Academia.eduAcademia.edu
This art icle was downloaded by: [ Connect icut College] , [ Jeanne- Marie Jackson] On: 25 Oct ober 2012, At : 06: 31 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK English Studies in Africa Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ reia20 Singular Exceptions: Animal Instrumentality in Tolstoy and Coetzee Jeanne-Marie Jackson Version of record first published: 25 Oct 2012. To cite this article: Jeanne-Marie Jackson (2012): Singular Except ions: Animal Inst rument alit y in Tolst oy and Coet zee, English St udies in Africa, 55:2, 29-42 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 00138398.2012.731288 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Full t erm s and condit ions of use: ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- and- condit ions This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warrant y express or im plied or m ake any represent at ion t hat t he cont ent s will be com plet e or accurat e or up t o dat e. The accuracy of any inst ruct ions, form ulae, and drug doses should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem and, or cost s or dam ages what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h or arising out of t he use of t his m at erial. Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 06:31 25 October 2012 singulAr EXcEptions: AnimAl instrumEntAlitY in tolstoY And coEtZEE Jeanne-marie Jackson Abstract How might we account for the lurry of recent attention to animals as subjects of serious literary and philosophical inquiry? While most scholars attribute this turn to the expanding parameters of subjectivity, this essay uses three major literary texts – Tolstoy’s Strider and Coetzee’s Disgrace and, secondarily, Waiting for the Barbarians – to make the case for animals as truth-afirming objects. In different ways, both of these writers ‘use’ animals to access an ontological singularity that opposes human signiication. Whereas Tolstoy enacts the constitution of universal subjecthood through division (that is, through self-estrangement) via an animal narrator, Coetzee seeks escape from the demands of subjectivity by depicting animals’ use as transigurative agents within a narrative. Keywords: Tolstoy, Coetzee, animals, subjectivity, subjecthood, instrumentality, singularity, ethics, estrangement He closed his eyes and began to droop his head. No one was holding it. Then his legs quivered and his whole body swayed. He was not so much frightened as surprised… He was surprised and started forward and upward, but instead of this, in moving from the spot his legs got entangled, he began to fall sideways, and trying to take a step fell forward and down on his left side. The knacker waited till the convulsions had ceased, drove away the dogs that had crept nearer, took the gelding by the legs, turned him on his back, told Vaska to hold a leg, and began to skin the horse. Tolstoy, Strider (1886) … (perhaps he will carry him in his arms, perhaps he will do that for him) and caress him and brush back the fur so that the needle can ind the vein, and whisper to him and support him in the moment when, bewilderingly, his legs buckle; and then, when the soul is out, fold him up and pack him away in his bag, and the next day wheel the bag into the lames and see that it is burnt, burnt up. He will do all that for him when his time comes. J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999) 29 DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2012.731288 E-mail: jeanne-marie.jackson@aya.yale.edu English Studies in Africa 55 (2) © University of the Witwatersrand pp 29–42 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 06:31 25 October 2012 Jeanne-Marie Jackson Though J.M. Coetzee has often made explicit his debt to nineteenth-century Russian realism, the similarities between Disgrace and Tolstoy’s seminal novella Strider have gone unnoticed: vivid scenes of animal killing extend through the fates of the corpses left behind, shells of lives sacriiced to an idea of truth that effaces its bodily incarnation. This oversight is perplexing given the voluminous attention to the role of dogs in Disgrace amidst what many have called the ‘animal turn’ in humanist scholarship. And yet, the direction this turn has taken provides its own explanation for the lapse. ‘If animal studies have come of age’, Kari Weil wrote recently, ‘it is perhaps because nonhuman animals have become a limit case for theories of difference, otherness, and power’ (3). My premise for comparing these two texts rejects this logic of species continuity, however ennobling its intention. In different ways, I argue, both Tolstoy and Coetzee construct animals as exceptions to the rules of subjectivity, made available by their nondiscursivity as ideal objects of narrative and philosophical subsumption or use. The connection between these two works therefore turns on something like ‘good’ objectiication, which is to say on animals’ capacity to represent a ‘higher truth’ that also inheres in their own existence. While this complicates efforts to implicate non-human subjects within a broader spectrum of ethical responsibility, it cuts right to the divide between Tolstoyan moral sweep and Coetzeean hesitation. How does animals’ use and effacement within these narratives speak to an irresoluble desire for what many of the critics who grapple with them have called singularity? And what is an ethical balance between singularity and generalization, or selfsigniication and ‘something more’? There is no clear-cut path to answering these questions, and the conversation I develop yoking Strider to Disgrace – which begins with Russian Formalism and moves through writing by Adorno and Paul Ricoeur – struggles to balance the abstract and the deiantly concrete. Disgrace, I conclude, marks an unnerving retreat from the nineteenthcentury universalism embedded in Strider’s form. If Tolstoy uses an animal narrator to renew our conception of subjectivity through text, Coetzee only ventures to depict a more limited kind of use and renewal within a single novel. to fortify one’s Arm: dismantling tolstoy’s Strider In 2007’s Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee writes that the later Tolstoy’s ‘decline into didacticism’ must have felt like it was ‘enabling him to face directly the one question that truly engaged his soul: how to live’ (193). When he champions Tolstoy’s thirst for ethical focus, though, Coetzee invokes a kind of negative clarity rather than positive instruction: And one is thankful to Russia too, Mother Russia, for setting before us with such indisputable certainty the standards toward which any serious novelist must toil, even if without the faintest chance of getting there: the standard of the master Tolstoy on the one hand and the master Dostoevsky on the other. By their example one becomes a better artist; and by better I do not mean more skillful but ethically better. They annihilate one’s impurer pretensions; they clear one’s eyesight; they fortify one’s arm. (227) The speciic challenge I want to address is how Coetzee negotiates the tension between openness to truth and its particular reassertion: is Disgrace an ‘ethical novel’, as so many have suggested, because it treats tough questions or because it stakes a claim to their resolution? To clarify this difference I set forth with a reading of Strider, Tolstoy’s 1886 morality tale about an aging horse and his suffering at the hands of corrupt humanity. I argue that Tolstoy does not just use an 30 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 06:31 25 October 2012 Singular Exceptions animal narrator to illustrate some sort of ethical truth (or at least, a desire for it), but through him positively enacts an ethics of instrumental singularity that is unattainable to humans. Coetzee, in contrast, uses animals as transigurative agents for people. I question, however, the toocommon emphasis on Levinasian alterity in his work to trace a more problematic search for self-signiication. Strider is probably best known to humanist audiences as a case study in Russian Formalist poetics, with which Coetzee demonstrates his familiarity in the collection Giving Offense (107). Viktor Shklovsky uses the novella to illustrate his formative concept of ‘estrangement’, or making the ‘stone feel stony’ (6). ‘[Tolstoy] does not call a thing by its name’, Shklovsky writes, ‘he describes it as if it were perceived for the irst time… In [Strider], where the story is told from the point of view of a horse, the objects are estranged not by our perception but by that of the horse’ (6–7). In even this simple observation there is a provocative paradox at play: Tolstoy draws us in to foster distance. In other words, there is a tension between the speciic ‘new thing’ being seen and the unrelenting need to see new things. Without being stripped of our habitual expectations about the objective world, the Formalist line goes, ‘our perceptive capabilities would wither and die’ (Holquist and Kliger 614). The moral consequences of this automatization are pernicious, as Shklovsky fears that it ‘eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war’ (5). Yet what can an ethics of estrangement – of singular encounter enforced through constant uprooting – have to offer in its place? This mechanistic explanation for Strider’s powerful impact on the reader seems somehow incomplete, not only in the sense of estrangement’s phenomenal interminability (it is a call to perpetual vigilance), but because the effect of restored singularity is valued over the singular experience being restored. Bakhtin School critic Pavel Medvedev points out as much, insisting that, ‘Tolstoy does not admire a thing that is made strange. On the contrary, he only makes it strange in order to move away from it, push it away in order to put forth the more sharply what is positive: a deinite moral value’ (60). In this case, the wonder of experiencing the world anew through a horse is less important than what the reader might learn in the process. Estrangement is thus rejected as an end in itself and upheld as a kind of means, risking relapse to just the sort of complacent teleology that Shklovsky wants to disrupt. Medvedev’s revision of Shklovsky, however, also indicates another sort of instrumentality at play: the subjugation of a singular object – in Strider, the horse itself and not just the things we see through him – to what we might think of as the larger estranging ‘triad’ it facilitates (object; uprooting effect; subject). If Tolstoyan estrangement forces a space for meaning where it has been lost, Medvedev insists that something more than renewed perception alone comes to ill this void. Either way, as Nancy Ruttenberg suggests, ‘The perceiver or subject of estrangement acts unilaterally on the object’ (720), rendering positive object value subsidiary to the renewed lease on meaning that it fosters. In other words, the object is restored to singularity so that the subject perceiving it can continually evolve, and the ‘truth’ that the object imparts is this useful oneness of form. In terms of Strider but also, ultimately, of Disgrace, I want to ask how animals help to reconcile Shklovsky’s renewing gap (that is, the negative principle of estrangement) with Medvedev’s deinitive assertion (its positive effect), or how Tolstoy estranges the reader with what moral value this estrangement foments. Is there moral content that is distinct from what Shklovsky sees as an intrinsically moral effect or device, and can we get there without falling back into the over-determined hierarchy from which he means to break free? The perception-renewing object is indistinguishable from its effect in the equine universe of Strider, which Tolstoy frames alternately at a third-person remove and through the world31 Jeanne-Marie Jackson Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 06:31 25 October 2012 weary consciousness of his title character. When he provides the ailing Strider with a irst-person voice, Tolstoy both increases the distance between our expectations of reality, as well as the reality being represented, and ills this space with positive subject-identiication. Furthermore, the emergence of Strider as narrator is the means by which Tolstoy achieves the renewing effect of estrangement without lapsing into the one-dimensional objectiication it often entails. Harassed by other horses, the corral patriarch is literally backed into verbal communication, thus enacting the transformation of an object into a subject as the content and not merely the process of encountering the narrative: All the horses, young and old, ran after the gelding, showing their teeth and driving him all round the yard; one heard the sound of hoofs striking against his bare ribs, and his deep moaning. He could no longer endure this, nor could he avoid the blows. He stopped in the middle of the paddock, his face expressing irst the repulsive weak malevolence of helpless old age, and then despair: he dropped his ears, and then something happened that caused all the horses to quiet down. (446) While the story up to this point has depicted Strider’s suffering in mostly realistic terms – neighs, whinnies, and the like – this proves unsatisfactory to elicit either compassion in the other horses or the reader’s uprooting. At the same time, the recourse to language by which we are distanced from Strider as a realistic object of sympathy is the cause of his own self-alienation: subjecthood robs him of the ontological singularity afforded by non-lingualism to foster empathy where the reader’s sympathy is disrupted. ‘When I was born’, Strider confesses, ‘I did not know what piebald meant – I thought I was just a horse. I remember that the irst remark we heard about my color struck my mother and me deeply’ (447). This deining feature of Tolstoy’s text brings to mind Adorno’s passing relections on animal consciousness in Negative Dialectics. ‘The individual becomes a subject insofar as its individual consciousness objectiies it, in the unity of the self as well as in the unity of its experiences’, he asserts, whereas ‘to animals, presumably, both unities are denied’ (46). The mutually enabling unities that Adorno suggests here can be translated into the terms of singularity that I propose as the thread linking Strider to Disgrace, thereby reining the signiicance of animality to both works. Why does a horse, for Tolstoy, most effectively bridge the gap between the particular and the universal per the realist paradigm? For Adorno, the interdependence of ‘logical universality and the unity of the individual consciousness’ (46) is in fact a condition of duality, the subject’s very self-identiication as a unitary entity emerging from a process of estrangement in its own right. The one-dimensional singularity that Adorno attributes to animals therefore excludes the more robust singularity that results from this conscious act of self-creation through the suppression of rupture. Interestingly, Adorno remarks just a few pages earlier that ‘Nineteenth century individualism has indeed weakened the objectifying power of the mind, its capacity for insight into objectivity and for its construction; but it has also equipped the mind with a discriminating sense that strengthened its experience of the object’ (42). The quintessential nineteenth-century work, then, would be one which performs the subject’s ability to self-bind; in other words, to encounter the self as an object rather than relect on its place in the larger objective world. Tolstoy’s accomplishment from this angle is to manipulate human discursivity toward a self-transformational estrangement from humanity itself, facilitating enhanced perception of an ‘Other’ through what Shklovsky identiies as parallelism between horse and man (63). Yet the instantiation of subjecthood via an 32 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 06:31 25 October 2012 Singular Exceptions immanent objectiication that opposes objectivity, per Adorno, gives way to a still more complex division of sympathies: Strider is pitted against his fellow horses, as the reader’s privileged access to Strider pits him or her against other humans. The parallelism that Shklovsky attributes to estrangement is not only featured within Strider, then, but is part of the reader’s experience of Strider. The subject/object distinction breaks down altogether, as Tolstoy builds both positions into a single protagonist that allows the reader’s perspective to fracture and evolve. This is to say that, as Strider is wrested out of ‘Otherness’ and into discursive intelligibility, so the reader comes to experience estrangement as a condition that privileges subjectivity. Ruttenberg has broached the subject’s resistance to objective recognition in her work on Dostoevsky, in which she asks ‘What epistemological and ideological value inheres in estrangement as a means of defamiliarizing one’s own habitual blindness in order to see one’s non-seeing?’ (741). Estrangement, in other words, always runs the risk of self-redoubling, and revealing one’s habitual blindness in Strider (to the suffering of silent others, to the shallowness of mercenary concerns) is indeed its own reward. Accordingly, the revelation of any particular moral truth is easily overshadowed by the title character’s use as a vehicle for ‘moral truth’ writ large; we are back in the bind of estrangement’s ‘positive’ message being the fact of estrangement itself. It is therefore not the case, as recent efforts within ‘animal-standpoint criticism’ would have it, that Tolstoy refrains from using animal realities ‘metaphorically or allegorically or to comment metonymically on human situations’ (Donovan 39). In fact Strider is effective because he brings about our renewed understanding of subjective contingency and thus the human condition. Likewise, the use of his body after death by peasants and other animals is a inal act of selfsubjugation to, effectively, the humanly unattainable moral truth of conscious self-subjugation. The revelation of this message is not so much an entreaty to empathy as an experiment in its unavoidable self-relexivity. Thus, even if we accept that ‘the story’s main point is that immersed in a smug and false sense of superiority humans fail to appreciate the dignity and nobility of animals’, it does not follow that we have positively inhabited an animal’s subject position (Donovan 44). And yet this is not necessarily a pejorative re-casting of Strider, even within a context that seeks to reinstate animals as serious subjects of narrative coniguration. On the contrary, Strider’s capacity to effect both the negative properties of estrangement and the positive properties of empathy invokes the paradoxical basis of allegorical orientation toward higher truth. What Gordon Teskey calls the ‘psychological work’ of allegory entails ‘two operations: to use meaning as a wedge to split a unity into two things and to yoke together heterogeneous things by force of meaning’ (2). Seen in this light, the unitary object as which we irst encounter Strider is then narratologically re-introduced as a divisive subject, yoking both of these two heterogeneous ‘things’ to the still more heterogeneous reader. Teskey continues, ‘[t]he very word allegory evokes a schism in consciousness – between a life and a mystery, between the real and the ideal, between a literal tale and its moral – which is repaired, or at least concealed, by imagining a hierarchy on which we ascend toward truth’ (2). The unifying divisiveness of allegory thus recalls the renewed connection to the world that estrangement from our habitual experience of it fosters. More importantly, this language positions Strider as both a igurative representation of truth and its literal embodiment. He begins as a real object and dies an ideal subject, a igure whose singularity of purpose is unattainable for the reader who reaps the moral renewal of his death. Strider thus hinges not so much on the ‘realistic’ rehabilitation of an object to a subject position, but on a deviation from realism to make a sympathetic object intelligible from the reader’s subject position. As Ruttenberg writes of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy ‘illuminates that internal 33 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 06:31 25 October 2012 Jeanne-Marie Jackson force which resists, despite one’s best intentions, a true acknowledgment of the other as the privileged object of one’s efforts to understand’ (722). The ‘positive’ message, to follow Adorno, is the revelation of subjective wholeness-through-division as an immanent universality: ‘logical universality tends to predominate in individual experience’, he suggests. And yet consummating this process is not possible for the human subject (the reader) for whom meaning is restored as a result (46). By virtue of his death as an ideal subject, Strider’s object status ends up reinforced. So, if the renewed perception of subjecthood that Strider instrumentalizes only relects back on the human reader, what has really been achieved in the name of animal difference? The answer is that Strider’s ‘difference’ lies not in a generalizable kind of alterity but in his exceptionalism; in other words, his non-discursivity allows for his instructive promotion to the status of the universal. Were we not dealing with a horse whose verbal consciousness is obviously a device, this turn would be more problematic on multiple fronts. It alternately signals the relegation of an Other to an (albeit dynamic) object position, and the assimilation of particular objectivity to a generalized condition of subjectivity. How then might we move beyond this impasse? Can we arrive at a ‘positive’ truth that does not necessarily efface its incarnation? With this in mind, I turn to Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self from Oneself as Another, in which subjectivity is deined by its internal divisiveness to offer a route whereby relational meaning - ‘solicitude for one’s neighbor’ and ‘justice for each individual’ - can emerge from estrangement’s self-relexive gap (18). This is relevant irstly because I will engage with Coetzee criticism that raises the homogenizing specter of hermeneutics. More importantly, though, Ricoeur - rather than the more commonly cited Levinas - insists on robust narrativity as a means of overcoming the asymmetry of self and other without eradicating or terminally sublimating this tension. Indeed, Ricoeur’s polemic with Levinas in Oneself as Another hinges on just the issue of narrative embeddedness as ethics that I want to raise in the context of Strider. In other words, he does not speak in terms of ethical encounters between what he refers to as Levinas’ ‘great kinds’ of Self and Other, but of narrative as essential to subjective dynamism and the subject’s capacity to construct or perceive ethical meaning (335). As a result, the outwardly oriented notion of otherness is seen as intrinsic to an internally oriented conception of the subject. It is part of a dense argument that bears quoting at some length: From a critical perspective, [Levinas’] work is, in fact, directed against a conception of the identity of the Same, to which the otherness of the Other is diametrically opposed, but at a level of radicality where the distinction I propose between two sorts of identity, that of ipse and that of idem, cannot be taken into account: to be sure, this is not the result of some phenomenological or hermeneutical negligence but because, in Levinas, the identity of the Same is bound up with an ontology of totality that my own investigation has never assumed or even come across. It results that the self, not distinguished from the I, is not take in the sense of the self-designation of a subject of discourse, action, narrative, or ethical commitment. (335) Ricoeur thus establishes selfhood as a product of narrativity, never adequately addressed by the questions ‘what’ or ‘why’ but always a matter of ‘who’ or ‘whom’ and the estrangement that this determination entails: ‘Who is speaking of what? Who does what? About whom and about what does one construct a narrative?’ (17–19). The division between ‘I’ and ‘myself’, which maps onto the division between ‘I’ and ‘him’ that Tolstoy resolves through Strider, resounds through Ricoeur’s assertion that ‘To say self is not to say I’ (18). To say ‘piebald’, in other words, is not to say ‘Strider’, a distinction that is 34 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 06:31 25 October 2012 Singular Exceptions only meaningful because of the narrative context in which this alternation between objective revelation – something like Levinas’s ‘epiphany of face’ – and subjective claim is embedded (38). By encountering Strider as both ‘he’ and ‘I’, the reader is inducted into a view of otherness as something that is ‘not (or not merely) the result of comparison’, but that ‘can be constitutive of selfhood as such’ (Oneself 3). When Teskey proposes that ‘[a] poetics of allegory can achieve stability only by grounding itself on an unambiguous determination of the “other”… to which the discourse refers, the ideal “meaning”’ (Teskey 5), he opposes what we might call the local process of allegorical division and reunion to an ultimate determination of ‘singularity’, a ladder formed by roping many individual truths together in order to ascend toward the very highest. What Ricoeur formulates and Strider enacts is a way out of this violent assimilation. The tension between ‘a literal narrative that is “other” in a negative sense’ and the ‘transcendental otherness that we situate above the world in order to make that world’ (Teskey 6–7) might be alleviated if the objects that allegory or estrangement use became something like ladders to themselves. Because Strider’s death is the very height of his virtue, furthermore, it would be implausible to suggest that the positive moral message Medvedev insisted on in Tolstoy is one of proactive prevention of future (horse) suffering. What Tolstoy accomplishes is not to engender an ethics of universal sympathy for the object or other, but to make the division between subject and object come alive as the universal condition of subjectivity. Per Ricoeur, the possibility of ethical action emerges from the subject’s awareness of its narrative contingency, but to accomplish this Tolstoy sustains a supple objectivity that has no place in Levinas’s wariness of assimilation. ‘Because the Same signiies totalization and separation’, Ricoeur writes of Levinas, ‘the exteriority of the Other can no longer be expressed in the language of relation’ (Oneself 336). This point is illustrated in Levinas’s own contention that ‘the face glows in the trace of the Other: that which is presented there is absolving itself from my life and visits me as already ab-solute’ (44). The self’s act of approaching the Other, that is to say, already and inevitably marks its absence. If Strider imparts any truth beyond that of noble suffering and self-sacriice, it is thus intrinsic to immersion in its complex narrative structure. Strider’s death at the end of the novella is an apotheosis that afirms the constructive rather than purely differential paradigm at play: its force is derived from embedding, not encounter. When the horse dies, it is not by receding as a ‘trace’ of its full-blooded reality but as the full realization of a subject’s, and the subject’s ethical potential, which the reader can aspire to but not attain. In unfolding a narrative both of and through a horse, Tolstoy entreats the reader to answer not ‘what’ (a piebald), but ‘who’ (Strider), as he guides us not to ‘believe that’ it is wrong for horses to suffer so much as we ‘believe in’ the powerful wrongness of Strider’s suffering (Oneself 20–21). We are deep in the subjective orientation of estrangement, pricked to indignation at the objectiication of a beast that we know in his dynamic singularity. We are in so deep, in fact, that Strider’s inal reversion to an instructional object of our use may well go unnoticed. At each of these multiple levels of uprooting and reintegration, Tolstoy’s ‘positive’ moral message remains just out of reach. It is a demand for the conviction that narrative engenders, which must kill off its subject for his truth to be heard. giving him up: coetzee’s Ethics of Absence What then of the parallel passage in Disgrace with which I began this essay, and which commands as much sympathy for its human protagonist as it does for the dying animal? David Lurie seems to demonstrate the compassion that humans in Strider lack, and the subject/object interworkings 35 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 06:31 25 October 2012 Jeanne-Marie Jackson of estrangement are more in the text than a product of our interaction with it. This is a marked departure from the narratological tiers of Strider, calcifying as it does the dynamics of merciful exchange (‘he’ is always David, while ‘him’ is always the dog). I therefore want to focus on the deceptively simple question of why, in a novel so much about animals, they have no subjective presence. Though the body of scholarship on dogs in Disgrace has grown vast enough that new angles seem scarce, this omission provides a way in. As the inal word on Coetzee’s more clearcut distinction between human and animal or subject and object, that is, what value can death still contain? Put more bluntly, why are we so loath to challenge the simple fact of Lurie’s ‘giving him up’ (Disgrace 220)? Among the many readings of David’s evolving relationship with dogs – of the dogs’ transformation from objects to subjects in his eyes – there is little disagreement as to its charactertransforming effect (see Marais and Woodward). In line with this reading, most scholars see David’s burgeoning attachment to the dogs as approaching something like grace, as he gives himself up to the unknowable, or what Derek Attridge calls the ‘experience of inding oneself personally commanded by an inexplicable, unjustiiable, impractical commitment to an idea of a world’ (115). It is important, however, to note the key differences I have proposed. At no point in Disgrace are the roles of subject and object truly destabilized (narratologically or ontologically), and dogs’ capacity to act as transigurative agents is due precisely to the enforced and exceptional singularity of their object status. While Attridge rightly points out that David seeks to preserve the singularity of the self, rather than to further any systematized ethics of otherness, he too falls prey to the allure of the poignantly inscrutable aspects of David’s encounter with dogs (115). What this common move sidesteps is the afirmative quality of the dogs’ deaths for David as a subject, or the extent to which he enforces his idea of singularity at the expense of admitting it in the lesh. In all the critical mindfulness of the ‘otherness of the Other’ (Marais 166) or the ‘lasting mystery’ of David’s desire (Attridge 117), there is room for a little more pressure on the concrete choices such enigmas entail. David helps euthanize, for lack of space or resources, ‘the old, the blind, the halt, the crippled, the maimed, but also the young, the sound – all those whose term has come’. Yet though a dog he’s grown attached to is among the ‘halt’, he has not necessarily met his time: ‘He can save the young dog, if he wishes, for another week’. And so why doesn’t he? It is David, not circumstances, who determines that the dog’s death ‘cannot be evaded’, and we scarcely pause to question the fatalism (Disgrace 218–219). In fact there is no reason presented that this dog, this time cannot be held onto, and his obvious lourishing belies any claim to mercy. Be it for one week or many months (as is the case with a bulldog in the novel who stays with David’s daughter, Lucy), the fact is that David makes no effort to single out his companion. This is not love but use: his tenderness toward dog corpses earlier in the novel promotes a commendable ‘idea of the world’ (146), but what of this living thing’s assimilation into the dead many of an idea? The actual singularity of the dog David gives up leaves us at something of an impasse. Even as David learns to ‘concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing’ (219), the animal is not granted leeting and inal subjecthood so much as its status as object is intensiied. Marais paraphrases Levinas in what is now a widely revisited and reconigured interpretation of Disgrace and Coetzee more generally: So, through a resistance grounded in radical difference rather than force, the Other maintains his/her distance from the subject. In a seeming paradox, though, this distance is also an approach and therefore a proximity. The subject’s failure to reduce the Other to 36 Singular Exceptions Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 06:31 25 October 2012 an object of an intentional act of consciousness, and in so doing to integrate him/her into the economy of the Same, means that s/he is surprised by the Other. Unable to ignore the Other, the subject inds him/herself in a relation to an absolutely singular Other whom s/ he can neither include in nor exclude from his/her psyche. (166) At irst glance, a Levinasian reading of the ‘ininite Other’ accounts for Coetzee’s unwillingness to actually narrate animal subjectivity (à la Tolstoy’s gamble in Strider). Yet it also absolves David Lurie of agency, failing as it does to engage the ‘Sameness’ into which the banjo-loving dog is indeed forcibly integrated. This dog is literally ‘given up’ to the position of animals in general, his present lourishing subjugated to collective suffering and David’s evolving compassion. Marais’s language of surprise, too, contradicts Disgrace’s theme of resignation: ‘“It gets harder all the time”, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier too. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet’ (219). Rather than offer another reading of this increased tenderness toward animals as a mark of David’s ethical evolution (with or without implications for his interaction with people), I am interested in unraveling the logic of instrumentality still at play. ‘Coetzee subscribes … to a Levinasian ethics’, Michael Chapman summarizes Coetzee criticism from 1990 onward, ‘that is, the Same is obliged to acknowledge the singularity, the irreducibility, of the Other’. Yet he goes on to poke useful holes in this trend, asking ‘What is the difference between a concern with alterity and a concern with the Other?’ before criticizing their interchangeability in the ‘amalgam of Foucault, Derrida, Levinas and other continental philosophers of difference’ (106) that dominates treatments of Disgrace. Chapman, too, criticizes Marais’s too-easy conlation of a particular Other with alterity as an idea, noting that ‘Sometimes it is convenient in Marais’s defence of Coetzee that the Other remains abstract: so the rape scene [of David’s daughter, Lucy] is denuded of lesh and blood to become a kind of structural parallel … [an] “analogue”, or allegory…’. I agree with Chapman that Coetzee is concerned not so much with alterity writ large as with the more intractable issue of ‘reciprocity that harbours its selish desires’ (106–107), yet he too overlooks the unique way-out that animals provide from this quandary. In other words, they are signiicant because we can pity them without shame. The concept of Levinasian Otherness, whose rote application to Coetzee Chapman bemoans, is nowhere more evident than in Rebecca Saunders’s reading of Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, which introduces an important and illuminating detour from Disgrace. Speciically, Saunders champions the power of allegory to the same degree that Chapman questions it in her analysis of the quasi-romantic relationship between that novel’s besieged state administrator and the blind native woman he takes in. While Chapman insists on the importance of ‘lesh and blood’ to keep material Otherness from being co-opted by abstract alterity, Saunders maintains that ‘discourses are the regulatory mechanisms through which material conditions came to be’ (216). Her application of this concept to Waiting for the Barbarians is even harder to swallow, and in its sweeping characterization of the novel as ‘an allegorical text’ (223), it fails to account for the problematic place of allegory within the text. ‘In no doubt the most patently allegorical moment of the novel’, Saunders writes, ‘the empire and the magistrate face off over a box of signs’ (227). Placed in a larger context, though, the episode in question highlights the tension between signiication and singularity, or really, representation and reality as such. Though the magistrate insists to the empire’s Colonel Joll that the wooden sticks with unrecognizable characters ‘form an allegory’ and can be ‘read in many ways’ (Barbarians 112), the magistrate is resigned just moments before to the futility 37 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 06:31 25 October 2012 Jeanne-Marie Jackson of interpretation. ‘I have no idea what they stand for’, he concedes of the sticks. ‘Does each stand for a single thing … or does a circle merely stand for “circle”, a triangle for “triangle”, a wave for “wave”?’(110). While Saunders contends that the magistrate’s obsession with symbols ‘repatriates the foreignness in signiication that the empire has attempted to eradicate’ (228), it is by no means so clear that this scene is an allegory for, essentially, the importance of allegory. The magistrate resists the empire’s meta-narrative of civilization by offering made-up, ambiguous translations of the sticks, yet he is tragically unable to mount a viable alternative to its incursion. This indicates something far less optimistic than Saunders’s account of discursivity’s power to alter or engender material reality. In fact, it rings truer to Chapman’s anxieties about alterity being generalized to the point of meaningless abstraction, and the humanities’ ineficacy in the face of real political challenge (106). The magistrate’s semiotic decoding, in this light, greets tanks charging forward with a handheld ‘caution’ sign. Allegory here does not preserve the power of difference; it diffuses it. The implications of the magistrate’s semiotic compulsions also far exceed his attempts to decipher authorless foreign script. Even without excavating the full complexity of the magistrate’s relationship with this ‘barbarian’ girl, her place in the larger narrative of singularity and signiication that I am constructing is essential. ‘I feed her, shelter her, use her body’, says the magistrate when narrating a bathing ritual, before noting that after some time and resistance ‘She yields to everything’ (30). After inuring the girl to his ‘intimacies’ so that she is a receptacle for charity, the magistrate proceeds to literally render her an object of his interpretative need: ‘It has been growing more and more clear to me that until the marks on this girl’s body are deciphered and understood I cannot let go of her’ (31). Catharsis is the aspiration not of the mauled woman whom the magistrate has ‘saved’, but of the magistrate himself, as the ‘reciprocity’ that scholars like Chapman and Attwell rightly question is collapsed into self-actualization. The risks are evident even in the magistrate’s well-intentioned skepticism of his own relexivity, when he remarks on his ‘vanity’ and self-seduction into ‘these meanings and correspondences’. Even in his efforts to restore the singularity of material encounter, he slips unwittingly back into subjective orientation: ‘How can I believe that a bed is anything but a bed, a woman’s body anything but a site of joy?’ (44). The question, of course, is joy for whom? Later, the magistrate lauds himself for having ‘relieved [the girl] of the shame of begging and installed her in the barracks kitchen as a scullery-maid’ (32). In both this example and that of the wooden sticks whose messages are as inscrutable as the girl coaxed into silence, deliberate action (the empire’s incursion; the girl’s begging) is opposed to the ambiguous and interminable process of semiotic decoding. But far from upholding the space between literal and symbolic meaning – the space of allegory – as a valuable counter to these pejorative certainties (of hunger, or war), Coetzee unveils the destructive effects of allegory when it enters the realm of human interaction. ‘Indeed, the uncertainty of textual and contextual signs and the inaccessibility of the past whose traces they bear move the magistrate to imagine’, Saunders proposes, ‘to adopt a practice that is ostensibly even more uncertain than reading and as contrary to truth as error itself’ (227). For Saunders, though, what she calls the ‘zone of error’ that the magistrate enters through interpretation is ultimately a good thing, as it can ‘defamiliarize and contest the discursive “wisdom” through which the empire maintains power’ (226–227). Yet yoking the ‘linguistic foreignness’ of the wooden sticks to the ‘“literal” foreignness’ of the barbarian girl (Saunders 231) minimizes a crucial distinction. The enforced foreignness of the girl comes at a price that is also a gain: it does not merely recuperate allegory from the empire’s ‘radical coincidence of sign and referent’ (Saunders 230), but instrumentalizes the magistrate’s ‘rapture, of a kind’ (Barbarians 29). 38 Singular Exceptions Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 06:31 25 October 2012 But what does this have to do with Strider or David Lurie’s dogs in Disgrace? In sum, they converge on the gains and risks of collapsing particular Otherness into a more general alterity. When the magistrate rescues the girl from begging and installs her in his home, there is little doubt that he views himself as acting responsibly. In so doing, however, he enforces the very helplessness that he responds to, allegorizing the individual girl as generalized victim en route to the ‘highest’ truth (to revisit Teskey’s model) of his own self-relexive charity. The subjugation of literal to symbolic is concretized by the image of a baby fox cub that the magistrate has taken into his care, and which has not adapted well to its new environment: “It’s a very pretty little creature”, I say. She shrugs. “Animals belong outdoors”. “Do you want me to take it to the lake and let it go?” “You can’t do that, it is too young, it would starve to death or dogs would catch it”. So the fox cub stays. Sometimes I see its sharp snout peeking out from a dark corner. Otherwise it is only a noise in the night and a pervasive tang of urine as I wait for it to grow big enough to be disposed of. “People will say I keep two wild animals in my rooms, a fox and a girl”. She does not see the joke, or does not like it … “I am sorry”, I say, the words falling inertly from my mouth. I reach out ive dough-ingers and stroke her hair. “Of course it is not the same”.(Barbarians 34–35) The reader is offended by the magistrate’s callous comparison of a complex human to a shamelessly defecating animal, based only on their shared position of victimhood. In fact they are joined by their failure as victims or to effect the magistrate’s rapture in their salvation. By resisting the implication that she represents anything but herself, the girl undoes the magistrate’s attempts to ind truth in the paradox of jointly inhabited difference. Yet, while the girl bristles at being likened to the fox cub, the fox cub is obviously unaware of and indifferent to its representation of the girl. In other words, this allegorical ‘equation’ (the divisionby-conlation of two material beings to represent the truth of their shared disempowerment) is only effective and unproblematic in one direction. When the magistrate notes from prison that he ‘[guzzles his] food like a dog’, for example, because ‘a bestial life is turning [him] into a beast’ (80), the ‘like’ denotes both degradation and an estranging consciousness of degradation. The magistrate will never be a beast, but always only like one. On the contrary, the animal in both of these instances is an effective allegorical agent because of its literalism, something akin to what I have been calling singularity: the cub’s demands are not subject to the referential ambiguity of the girl’s. It seeks a place to defecate, food to eat, and space to roam, without the duality that Ricoeur identiies as intrinsic to selfhood. If the girl deies allegorical encoding in her silent demand to be considered as a self-representational but intrinsically un-singular being, the cub’s non-discursivity makes it amenable to use as a vehicle for other meanings. The fox cub may suffer from the material consequences of the magistrate’s thoughtlessness, in other words, but it does not suffer from being used to represent this thoughtlessness. Though the layers pile up and we arrive before long at the re-doubling insistence of allegory (does not the girl now represent, if nothing else, the dificulties of symbolic representation?) Coetzee provides a concrete illustration of the difference between human and animal ‘objects’ 39 Jeanne-Marie Jackson (of allegory, estrangement, or interpretation). Upon encountering a ram on a hunt, the magistrate inds himself reluctant to ire his gun: Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 06:31 25 October 2012 With the buck before me suspended in immobility, there seems to be time for all things, time even to turn my gaze inward and see what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour: the sense that this has become no longer a morning’s hunt but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim; that for the duration of this frozen moment the stars are locked in a coniguration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things. (40) The tension between what I have been calling singularity on the one hand and representation on the other is enforced here on two levels. It is notable that time is not, for example, ‘suspended’ to render the magistrate unhinged from the immediate consequences of his actions, but ‘frozen’ to isolate the magistrate with them. In other words, he is not freed to consider the ‘higher’, more abstract truths that a hunt might represent. He is forced instead to confront the profound concreteness of his actions: if he pulls the trigger, the ram will bleed before him. And yet somehow, it is this moment of isolated confrontation, of singular impact, that most effectively inspires allegorized ethical action (or in this case, restraint). Though we are not privy to precisely what ‘other things’ this encounter stands for, the promise of such truths is enough to stop the magistrate in his tracks. It is crucial, though, that this example be seen as the exception to, rather than the rule of, responsible action in the novel. The magistrate is only able to couple irreducibility with allegorical asymmetry (between literal and symbolic, or immediate and abstract) vis-à-vis dogs and rams. ‘The singularity operates in an allegory as does the vanishing point in a linear perspective’, Teskey explains. ‘[I]t is never visible itself, but everything that is visible directs the eye toward it’ (5). Unlike his relationship with the girl, the magistrate’s confrontation with the ram invokes this elusive vanishing point to spare rather than harm the object in question. In order to represent singularity of a ‘higher’ sort, that is, the ram demands recognition of the literal singularity of encounter. Why is the ram’s life spared, while the dog’s is sacriiced? Again we come back to the question of what it means to give him up, but now with irmer footing to move toward an answer. The ethical risks of instrumentality as depicted in Waiting for the Barbarians circle the fraught space between a literal object and its symbolic implication: to maintain this space is, Saunders suggests, to resist the foreclosure of foreign narratives, while collapsing it threatens to diffuse the object’s potentiality of meaning in favor of a particular truth. When she heralds the power of allegory to preserve an open ield of meaning, though (to keep particular objects from being used to enforce an idea) she opposes the Formalist poetics that I began with to the hermeneutic tradition of which Ricoeur is a part. ‘If hermeneutics prescribes what we should do with the foreign’, she suggests, ‘[Shklovsky examines] what the foreign does to us’ (217). Yet in my reading through this same theoretical lens, animal death in Disgrace reveals something quite different: when David Lurie euthanizes the dog that we’re told loves banjo, he pits singularity against subjectivity. The dog is effaced to facilitate David’s singularity of purpose, recalling the paradox of Strider but without instrumentalizing, without narrativizing, a corollary, didactic effect vis-à-vis the reader. Recalling the mechanics of estrangement, the dog inspires David’s renewed belief in commitment, love, and the possibility of their existence only so long as it remains outside of signiicatory polyvalence. Ricoeur once claimed that, ‘action itself, action as meaningful, may become an object of science … by virtue of a kind of 40 Singular Exceptions objectiication similar to the ixation which occurs in writing’ (‘Model’ 98). I would take this one step further and claim that the objectiication and thus the interpretability of David’s sacriicial act also demands objectiication of a more immediate sort. That is, of the little dog standing before him. Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 06:31 25 October 2012 conclusion People, like Coetzee’s barbarian girl and David Lurie with the ‘soul that is dark to [others]’ (Disgrace 58), resist interpretation and the use toward higher meaning it entails. Were this essay only rehashing the estrangement inherent to subjectivity (per Ricoeur), it would be enough to end there. But it is also about animals’ unique capacity to enact the paradox of universal singularity, and so I conclude instead with a return to Adorno. ‘[Words’] precision substitutes for the thing itself’, he writes, ‘without quite bringing its selfhood to mind; there is a gap between words and the thing they conjure’ (53). This gap is representation, and both Tolstoy and Coetzee strain to alleviate it by narrating animal self-signiication. But while Strider speaks by being spoken for (hacked to bits of lesh that nourish the unattainable truth of a selless life), Disgrace’s nameless dog is quietly killed off to avoid the risk that this demands. WorKs citEd Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1992. Attridge, Derek. ‘Age of Bronze, State of Grace: Music and Dogs in Coetzee’s Disgrace’. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 34.1, 2000: 98–121. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich and Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. Trans. Albert J. Wehrle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Chapman, Michael. ‘The Case of Coetzee: South African Literary Criticism, 1990 to Today’. Journal of Literary Studies 26.2, 2010: 103–117. Coetzee, J.M. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin, 1980. Coetzee, J.M. Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. New York: Penguin, 1999. Coetzee, J.M. Diary of a Bad Year. London: Harvill Seker, 2007. Donovan, Josephine. ‘Tolstoy’s Animals’. Society and Animals 17.1, 2009: 38–52. Holquist, Michael and Ilya Kliger. ‘Minding the Gap: Toward a Historical Poetics of Estrangement’. Poetics Today 26.4, 2005: 613–636. Levinas, Emmanuel. Humanism of the Other. Trans. Nidra Poller. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Marais, Michael. ‘“Little enough, less than little: nothing’: Ethics, Engagement, and Change in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee’. Modern Fiction Studies 46.1, 2000: 159–182. Ricoeur, Paul. ‘The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text’. New Literary History 5.1, 1973: 91–117. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself As Another. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Ruttenberg, Nancy. ‘Dostoevsky’s Estrangement’. Poetics Today 26.4, 2005: 719–751. 41 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 06:31 25 October 2012 Jeanne-Marie Jackson Saunders, Rebecca. ‘The Agony and the Allegory: The Concept of the Foreign, the Language of Apartheid, and the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee’. Cultural Critique 47.1, 2001: 215–264. Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990. Teskey, Gordon. Allegory and Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Tolstoy, Lev. ‘Strider’. Trans. Aylmer and Louise Maude. The Portable Tolstoy. Ed. John Bayley. New York: Viking Penguin, 1978. Weil, Kari. ‘A Report on the Animal Turn’. Differences 21.2, 2010: 1–23. Woodward, Wendy. The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2008. 42