Contested Epistemological and Ethical Spaces

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Contested Epistemological and Ethical Spaces:

The Place of Non-Humans in Milan Kundera's
The Unbearable Lightness of Being and J. M.
Coetzee's Disgrace
a
Harry Sewlall
a
Department of English , North West University , South Africa
Published online: 13 May 2013.
To cite this article: Harry Sewlall (2013) Contested Epistemological and Ethical Spaces: The Place of Non-Humans in
Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace , English Academy Review: Southern
African Journal of English Studies, 30:1, 76-91, DOI: 10.1080/10131752.2013.783392
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10131752.2013.783392
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Contested Epistemological and Ethical Spaces:
The Place of Non-Humans in Milan Kundera’s
The Unbearable Lightness of Being and
J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace1
Harry Sewlall
Department of English
Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 10:41 19 March 2015
North West University

South Africa
Harry.Sewlall@nwu.ac.za
Nandita Batra writes, ‘Animals have arguably been the oldest metaphor used to define
humanity, to construct human identities by symbolizing what humans are and are not’
(2003. Dominion, Empathy, and Symbiosis. In The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993–2003.
ed. Michael Branch and Scott Slovic, 155. Athens: The University of Georgia Press). In an
anthropocentric universe in which man/woman is the measure of all things, animals serve
a utilitarian purpose at worst, and as objects of affection at best. How humans define
themselves in relation to one specific animal – the canine – is explored in Kundera’s The
Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984. trans. Micheal Henry Heim. London: Faber and Faber)
and Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999. London:Vintage.). Though peripheral to the main thematic
concerns of both novels, the dog inhabits an important epistemological and ethical
space in both these texts. By entering the lives of the protagonists at crucial existential
moments, the dog serves as a metaphor to define what it means to be human vis-à-vis the
animal (as a general category of being) and other humans. In Coetzee’s novel, the banjo-
loving mongrel, condemned to death by euthanasia, becomes a catalyst in the spiritual
and emotional awakening of the serial womanizer David Lurie. Kundera’s text – in which
the male protagonist’s priapism is elevated to metaphysical heights – features a female
dog named, paradoxically, Karenin, after the husband of Tolstoy’s eponymous heroine,
Anna Karenina. Like Tolstoy’s tragic protagonist, the dog is fated to die a tragic death but
not before it has received the care and devotion of its human companions. This article
is an exploration of how both texts rupture the epistemological boundaries between
the human and what has traditionally been regarded as his/her ultimate other, the non-
human, and in doing so, contribute to the evolving aesthetics of animal configuration in
literary texts.
Key words:
animal subjectivity; canine; J. M. Coetzee; epistemological and ethical
spaces; human/non-human relationship; Milan Kundera
English Academy Review 30 (1) 2013

ISSN: Print 1013-1752/Online 1753-5360
© The English Academy of Southern Africa
DOI: 10.1080/10131752.2013.783392 pp. 76–91
1.indd 1 2011/05/20 15:07:14
EAR 30(1)2013_layout.indd 76 4/25/2013 1:27:44 PM

Contested Epistemological and Ethical Spaces ... 77
1
Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) and J. M. Coetzee’s
Disgrace (1999) have attained canonical status in the pantheon of postmodern fiction.
As postmodern classics, which have been adapted and transformed into successful
cinematic texts, these novels lend themselves to contested interpretations, even vexed
ones. While I would not venture to propose that Coetzee’s work borrows consciously
from its predecessor, there are certain uncanny resemblances between them – some
superficial and others not so. Both novels feature male protagonists who are serial
womanizers, although Coetzee’s character David Lurie is no match for the libidinous
Tomas, the medical doctor in Kundera’s novel. Both texts feature male university
professors forming sexual liaisons with their young female students; and both novels
have headstrong male characters from an intellectual background. Both novels are also
configured by political contingency: Kundera’s novel is set against the cataclysmic
events of 1968 when Czechoslovakia was invaded by Russia, while Coetzee’s novel is
set in the aftermath of South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994 which altered
the power relations between whites and blacks forever, giving rise to the kind of white
middle-class disaffection epitomized by the protagonist, Lurie. These intertextual
resonances might be considered superficial or even coincidental. However, where the
two novels intersect most definitively (and which constitutes the locus of this article)
is in their presentation of non-human characters, namely, canines. The use of the word
‘characters’ in reference to the dogs is deliberate, not least of all to imply that these
sentient, non-human creatures have been invested with human subjectivity and agency
in both these texts. While literary scholarship generally acknowledges the thematic
relevance of the canine in the Coetzee novel, this has patently not been the case with
Kundera’s novel, where critical exegesis, with one or two exceptions, has focused on its
postmodernist abstractions. This article seeks to redress this critical hiatus in relation to
Kundera’s novel and to establish its intertextual affinity with the Coetzee text.
The relationship between humans and dogs has a long history. Meredith Palumbo,
who specializes in African art history, writes:
Archaeological evidence confirms that man and dog have enjoyed a complex, symbiotic
relationship since the Stone Age, when the dog was an effective hunting companion and
protector of the family unit . . . Among the Egyptians and Greeks, dogs were held in such
esteem that two major stars, Sirius and Canis Major were named for them. In the post-
Classical world, dogs became part of the visual discourse of Christianity as ‘earthly symbols’
of virtue . . . Artists frequently included dogs on the periphery of religious and spiritual
observances in Renaissance and Baroque paintings. In one of the most famous examples, Jan
Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, the artist included a small dog in the foreground to
symbolize marital fidelity and desire. (2008, 263)
Susan McHugh traces the relationship between humans and canines to the last Ice Age,
about 12 000 to 14 000 years ago (2004, 14). McHugh further makes the crucial point

78 Harry Sewlall
that the figure of the dog has been historically imbricated with racial hierarchies, such
as in ancient Greece where ‘depictions of the peoples of India, for instance, develop
their metaphoric association with dogs to represent them as ‘Europe’s original noble
savages’ (p. 27). The figure of the canine, which also has a political investment in
Kundera’s and Coetzee’s texts, has always occupied an ambivalent space in society,
serving both as a faithful companion to some, as well as being perceived as a symbol of
brutality and brutalization by others. It is the latter perspective of the dog in the South
African imaginary that Njabulo Ndebele had in mind when he penned his celebrated
essay calling on South Africans to honour the dog. Ndebele’s action was prompted by
a clarion call from Zizi Kodwa, a spokesperson for the African National Congress, who
said outside the court house during Jacob Zuma’s rape trial that ‘dogs have to be hit
very hard until their owners and handlers come out into the open’ (Mail & Guardian
1–7 September 2006). Ndebele responded to this metaphorical allusion to the agents of
apartheid:
Perhaps if we stop brutalising the dog, if we stop brutalising ourselves whenever we invoke
the cruel image of the dog we have created, we may recover our own humanity, which we
lost along the way of our history. It is time for us to step out of the mire of our violent history.
Comrades, let us now honour the dog. Let’s declare 2007 ‘The Year of the Dog!’ (2006, 8)
Ndebele’s message to South Africans, especially the black majority of the population to
whom the figure of the canine symbolized institutionalized violence and terror during
the apartheid era, is pertinent not only to the two texts under consideration, but also to
the present-day reality of living in South Africa – a matter which is addressed in my
conclusion.
It has become a Hollywood cliché to say that when a lead star is cast next to a
child or a dog, that actor or actress risks being eclipsed by the child or the animal. In
December 2010, film critic for the Mail & Guardian Shaun De Waal concluded his
review of the mediocre sequel Paranormal Activity 2 by sardonically remarking that
‘[t]he most interesting character in the movie, with the possible exception of the pool-
cleaning machine, is the dog’ (Mail & Guardian 10–16 December 2010). Once again
it is worth noting the use of the word ‘character’ by the film critic when referring to a
non-human animal. A more recent high-profile case of a dog stealing the limelight was
in the silent film The Artist, for which the Jack Russell terrier named Uggie won the
Palm Dog Award for Best Performance by a Canine at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011.
Unfortunately, there was no such tangible accolade for Uggie at the 2012 Hollywood
Academy Awards when The Artist went on to capture five Oscars.
Although the dog is peripheral to the main thematic concerns of Kundera’s The
Unbearable Lightness of Being and Coetzee’s Disgrace, this non-human character
inhabits a significant epistemological, political and ecologically ethical space in
both these texts. The prominence given to the figure of the canine is reinforced by a
seemingly mundane detail appearing on the cover design of the first edition of Disgrace

(Vintage 2000) and the 1984 Faber and Faber edition of Kundera’s novel. Although
literary scholars do not usually make the cover design of a text the starting point of their
exegesis – for the simple reason that the semiotics of cover design is not a permanent
feature of textual production – in the case of the two novels under discussion a special
pleading is in order. Kundera’s novel, not to mention the film version of it, is misleadingly
notorious for the sexual couplings of its main protagonist, Tomas. Contrary to what the
reading public might have expected as a cover design, especially from the point of sales
figures, Faber and Faber settled for a staid black-and-white stick figure of a long-eared
canine below the title. The cover of the first edition of the Coetzee novel, on the other
hand, has a colour photograph depicting a lone, scraggy stray animal roaming a stark
rural wasteland. John Berger, in his collaborative study Ways of Seeing (1972), posits:
‘We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things
and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding
things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are’ (1972, 9).
The motif of the derelict canine on the cover of Coetzee’s novel not only resonates with
David Lurie’s compassion for the stray animals, but also functions as a trope for the
stark socio-political reality that the reader will encounter in the text. In their different
but pertinent ways, Kundera and Coetzee present the image of the dog – a creature that
is either loved or spurned by society – for our humane consideration.
2
In his essay on Kundera’s novel, André Brink concedes that the book has been subjected
to ‘many kinds of reading’ (1998, 269), the main one being as a ‘poignant love story’
which survives the main protagonist’s ‘compulsive womanizing’ and the brutal Russian
invasion of Czechoslovakia, until ‘they escape from it all by leaving Prague and settling,
with their dog Karenin, in a remote country village’ where they are killed in an accident,
crushed by a truck. As a philosophical work, Brink argues, the novel has been regarded
as ‘an enquiry into the lightness and the weight of existence’ (ibid.). Brink’s essay, a
sustained exercise in structuralist analysis, explores the binaries in the text, such as the
body as opposed to the soul, sex, flirtation and infidelity as opposed to love, human
excrement as opposed to kitsch, and so on, and how these opposites are imbricated in
Kundera’s philosophical constructs of lightness, weight and being.
In fairness to Brink, the dog Karenin is peripheral to his structuralist reading of
the novel, hence his passing references to the animal. In one such instance he refers to
Tereza’s ‘seemingly ludicrous, senseless ministrations to her dying dog Karenin’ (1998,
275). On another occasion, referring to the hybrid pedigree of the animal, he writes that
it is a ‘a creature in which lightness and heaviness themselves merge – the lightness
of its ludicrous existence’ (p. 276). Of the moment when Tereza and Tomas stand next
the dog’s death-bed, Brink observes: ‘[A]nd once again the wretched dog Karenin
embodies this terrible and miraculous ambivalence . . . As if the dog were a word in a

80 Harry Sewlall
dictionary, read and interpreted differently by two readers’ ( p. 281). Brink’s choice of
epithets such as ‘ludicrous’ and ‘wretched’ in relation to Karenin’s existence detracts
from the important space accorded to the animal in the text. Like the three-legged dog
in Coetzee’s Disgrace, Karenin, who has to adapt to walking on three legs after one is
amputated, occupies a more significant epistemological, ecological, and even textual
space in the novel than Brink’s passing references might seem to suggest. It is important
to observe that in this 305-page novel, the last chapter, which comprises 32 pages, is
titled ‘Karenin’s Smile’ and constitutes both a moving elegy to a family companion as
well as the author’s philosophical reflections on human/animal relationships.
Quite early in the novel the reader is informed that Tomas, after marrying Tereza,
gives her a puppy, which he has rescued from a litter of four, three of them destined to die:
‘[Tomas] felt like the president of the republic standing before four prisoners condemned
to death and empowered to pardon only one of them’ (p. 22). One is immediately
reminded of the fate of the dogs in Disgrace, which have to be euthanized since there
‘are simply too many of them’ (p. 142), and because the government is indifferent to
the fate of these creatures. Tomas chooses the bitch whose body is reminiscent of the
German shepherd which sired it, and whose head belongs to its mother, a Saint Bernard.
When it comes to the naming of the dog, Tomas, desirous of a name that would assert
Tereza’s ownership of it, suggests the name Tolstoy because she was carrying Anna
Karenina when he first saw her. Tereza suggests the name Anna Karenina but Tomas
thinks the dog’s face is too funny for any female. They decide on the name Karenin, the
husband of Anna Karenina, despite the dog’s gender. Throughout the book the dog is
treated as a male and is accorded the male gender pronouns he/him/his.
Karenin becomes an intimate and integral part of the conflicted lives of Tereza and
Tomas. In the mornings he would wait for the alarm to ring at six before jumping on
their bed to ‘trample their bodies, and butt them with his muzzle . . . Lately, Tereza
realized, she positively enjoyed being welcomed into the day by Karenin’ (p. 127).
Ecologically-orientated scholars, writing about non-human beings appearing in fiction,
sometimes refer to the embodied consciousness of the writers of these texts. Observing
Karenin’s antics in the morning when he wakes up his human companions, we notice
a similar embodied consciousness in Kundera’s writing: ‘Waking up was sheer delight
for him: he always showed a naïve and simple amazement at the discovery that he was
back on earth; he was sincerely pleased’ (ibid.). On receiving his morning bread roll,
Karenin does not devour it immediately but waits for Tomas to chase him around the flat
as if in pursuit of it. After a while, Karenin would ‘scramble under a table and gobble
up the roll’ (p. 128).
When Karenin becomes terminally ill with a cancerous tumour in his hind leg, the
narrative dwells on the care that Tereza and Tomas show him. Tomas uses his surgical
skills to operate on Karenin, with a vet in attendance. This period in the lives of Tomas,
Tereza and Karenin, leads to a metaphysical reflection on the lives of animals vis à vis
humans. These sections of the novel, in which the narrative voice assumes a strident tone,

are characterized by the kind of philosophical excursions which become emblematic

of the structure of the text. In its moral outrage at the ill-treatment of seemingly non-
sentient beings, the narrative verges on the irreverent: ‘The very beginning of Genesis
tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all
creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty
that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures’ (p. 277).
A few pages later, the narrative voice proclaims:
Man was not the planet’s master, merely its administrator, and therefore eventually responsible
for his administration. Descartes took a decisive step forward: . . . he was also the one who
point-blank denied animals a soul. Man is master and proprietor, says Descartes, whereas the
beast is merely an automaton, an animated machine, a machina animate . . . Thus, we have no
reason to grieve for a dog being carved up alive in a laboratory. (pp. 279–280)
René Descartes (1596–1650), arguably the most formidable philosophical and

mathematical mind of his time, has become a convenient whipping boy of modern
thinkers on animal issues. But Descartes was a product of his time, as were several other
philosophers who came before him and after him and who paid little or no attention to
the animal other in the epistemological design of the universe. Descartes is also the
target of Elizabeth Costello’s lecture in Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals:
Not so long before . . . all the cows in the village had names . . . But then the villages were
turned into a large collective factory, and the cows began spending all their lives in the five
square feet set aside for them in their cow sheds. From that time on, they have had no names
and become machinae animatae. The world has proved Descartes correct. (2000, 281–282)
Matthew Calarco writes, ‘Inasmuch as the notion of what constitutes animality has
traditionally been figured over and against what is supposed to constitute humanity,
when the notion of humanity is undercut, then the concept of animality suffers a similar
fate’ (2008, 3). Kundera’s novel illustrates that the converse of what Calarco avers is
also true: how easily human disregard for animals can turn into a pathology that turns
against humans themselves. As Tereza’s heifers graze in the field and the dying Karenin
rests its head in her lap, she recalls a few lines in a newspaper of how ‘the dogs in a
certain Russian city had been summarily shot’ (p. 280). This memory serves to bring to
her consciousness the horror of her neighbouring country. This horror was soon visited
upon pigeons, and a year after the Russian occupation, ‘the accumulated malice . . .
[found] its true goal: people. People started being removed from their jobs, arrested, put
on trial’ (p. 281).
Bruce Lord, who refers to the final chapter of the book (‘Karenin’s Smile’) as ‘a test
case for animal rights criticism’, asserts: ‘Not only do the novel’s final pages present
an emotional and compelling image of love and understanding between Karenin and
Tereza, but they also contain direct and explicit commentary on the issue of animal
rights and humanity’s responsibility to animals’ (2003). Animal consciousness, an

82 Harry Sewlall
important epistemological construct in the novel, contributing to its thematic lightness

of being, is given a Gandhian flourish in the following authorial intervention which is
tantamount to a manifesto on animal rights:
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its
recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply
buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And
in this respect, mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that
all others stem from it. (p. 281)
3
J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, which has been described by Craig MacKenzie as ‘the
most controversial novel of the past few decades’ (Mail & Guardian 21–27 October
2011), is stylistically different and, arguably, not as overly ambitious as Kundera’s
offering, in terms of philosophical breadth or sense of high tragedy. Much has been
written about Lurie the serial womanizer and the servant of Eros. Much has been said
about his clinically cold and misogynistic attitude to women, notably by Colin Bower
in his ad hominem broadside in which he referred to Coetzee as a ‘literary con artist and
poseur’ (Bower 2003, 3).
Having been ‘disgraced’ at the university, Lurie leaves for the rural settlement of
Salem in the Eastern Cape. It is here that he faces the next traumatic chapter of his life
when his daughter Lucy is raped by a gang of three men and he himself is doused with
methylated spirits and set alight. It comes as a shock to him that Lucy stoically comes
to terms with their predicament and is prepared to carry the child conceived through the
act of a multiple violation of her person. Thus begins for Lurie the arduous process of
healing, both physically and psychically, helped in no small measure by his voluntary
work with Bev Shaw at the animal clinic.
Personal transformation for Lurie, least of all transformation foisted on him by the
changing political dynamics of the land – first at the university and now on the settlement
at Salem – does not come easily to him. When Lucy takes him to be introduced to Bev
Shaw, he ‘is repelled by the odours of cat urine and dog mange and Jeyes Fluid that
greet them’ (p. 72). As they leave the premises, Lucy enquires how he feels about the
Shaws, to which he responds: ‘I don’t want to be rude. It’s a sub-culture of its own, I’m
sure. Don’t they have children?’ Lurie’s rejoinder at this juncture is not surprising and
is quite typical of the ratiocinative scholar who has spent a lifetime in academia. Lurie
expands on his notion of animal lovers being a ‘subculture’:
I’m sorry, my child, I just find it hard to whip up an interest in the subject. It’s admirable,
what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a
certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off
and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat. (p. 74)

Writing of Lucy’s radical transformation, Grant Farrad states: ‘She has been rendered,
however shallowly, autochthonous with the soil of the frontier. She has, as it were, had
the seeds of the border planted violently within her’ (2002, 19). David Lurie, anxious
not to offend his daughter, endorses her bucolic lifestyle while insisting on the essential
difference between animals and humans:
Lucy, my dearest, don’t be cross. Yes, I agree, this is the only life there is. As for animals, by
all means let us be kind to them. But let us not lose perspective. We are of a different order
of creation from the animals. Not higher, necessarily, just different. So if we are going to be
kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we feel guilty or fear retribution. (p. 74)
Yet it is the cynical Lurie who casually brings up the centuries-old theological debate
on whether animals have souls: ‘The Church Fathers had a long debate about them,
and decided they don’t have proper souls . . . Their souls are tied to their bodies and
die with them’ (p. 78). The contrast in Lurie’s attitude to the animals in the second half
of the novel, after the assault on Lucy and himself, is dramatic. As he becomes more
and more involved with the euthanizing of ‘superfluous canines’ (p. 142), he thinks he
would get used to it, until one day when he stops at the roadside and tears ‘flow down
his face that he cannot stop; his hands shake’ (p. 143). Such an uncharacteristic reaction
from Lurie prompts the question of whether he is not being overly sentimental. As if
anticipating the reader’s response, the narrator tells us that he ‘tries not to sentimentalize
the animals he kills’. Russell Samolsky is in agreement that this is no maudlin response
on Lurie’s part; indeed ‘the attention [Lurie] grants the corpses is not one of utility, but
one of profound mourning or even as he will later call it, love’ (2009, 150). When Lurie
notices that the workmen beat the carcases of animals to break the rigid limbs, he takes
over the job of feeding them into the incinerator because he is not prepared to dishonour
the creatures; because in his world ‘men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more
convenient shape for processing’ (p. 146).
The line between sentiment and sentimentality can be a fuzzy one, especially in
matters pertaining to human/animal relationships. In Lurie’s situation, despite his
erstwhile cynicism, it is impossible for him to bracket off his emotions. In their essay
‘Becoming-Animal’, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari are at pains to emphasize that
the term ‘becoming-animal’, as conceived by them, has nothing to do with ‘dreams’
or ‘phantasies’ (2004, 87); nor does it have to do with evolution. What they mean by
the term ‘becoming-animal’ is an alliance, or a symbiosis between man and animal.
According to them, when a sympathetic man contemplates a rat in its death throes, he
‘becomes a rat gnashing its teeth in its death throes. The rat and the man are in no way
the same thing, but Being expresses them both in a single meaning in a language that is
no longer that of words, in a matter that is no longer that of forms . . .’ (2004, 93).
Speaking of Coetzee’s representation of the relationship between Lurie and the
animals, Michiel Heyns goes beyond the notion of a symbiosis. He coins the term
‘sympathetic imagination’ to explain not simply the process of identifying with the
animal but to posit an empathetic relationship in which ‘we are awakened to compassion

84 Harry Sewlall
for human beings through recognizing our essential equality with animals in the face of
death’ (2002, 62).
One question that confronts the reader at the end of the novel is why Lurie, after
having given the banjo-loving ‘Driepoot’ a week’s reprieve, suddenly decides to give
him up. As he re-enters the surgery ‘[b]earing him in his arms like a lamb’ (p. 220),
Bev enquires ‘Are you giving him up?’, to which Lurie responds, ‘Yes, I am giving him
up’, thus bringing the novel to its finale. Most commentators have interpreted the act
of carrying the maimed animal like a lamb as having a Biblical resonance. Samolsky’s
comment typifies this view: ‘When the text speaks of David ‘bearing [the dog] in his
arms like a lamb’ . . . is it not possible to discern behind this Christian scene another older
substitution, the substitution of the ram for the child? Might the animal be sacrificed so
that the child [Lucy’s] may be born?’ (2009, 151).
Wendy Woodward’s explanation for Lurie’s sudden decision to give up the dog is
that for practical reasons he cannot keep the dog in his nomadic situation and, most
important, ‘metaphysically, he cannot protect the animal from [its] own mortality’
(2008, 140). The finality of Lurie’s comment, coming as the last sentence in the text,
does seem to reinforce Woodward’s interpretation of Lurie’s sudden decision. However,
there is another factor – a human factor – that could account for this sudden decision.
And here one must, of necessity, be anecdotal: to speak of euthanizing an animal in the
dispassionately cold print of academic discourse is one thing, but to see it to its conclusion
is another, especially if one has grown fond of the creature. Even trained veterinarians
cannot detach themselves completely from such an act, as any pet owner who has been
through this harrowing experience will testify. To contemplate the appointed day of the
dog’s demise is one of the most traumatic experiences any reasonably sensitive human
could endure. For Lurie too this must be an agonizing experience, hence, perhaps, his
sudden decision to get it over and done with. Such a reading is plausible in the light of
the transformation Lurie has undergone since his early facetious remark to Bev Shaw:
‘Do I like animals? I eat them, so I suppose I must like them, some parts of them’ (p. 81).
It is perhaps worth commenting that Lurie’s transformation from a sceptic and cynic
to one who cares enough for animals to mourn for them may seem dramatic, but it is
not beyond human comprehension. As an academic Lurie has taken a special interest
in the Romantics, and it is not far-fetched to suggest that subliminally he might have
come under the influence of poets such as Shelley, a vegetarian and an ardent advocate
of animal rights who abhorred the killing of animals. Furthermore, the pantheism that
is embodied in the works of Romantics such as Wordsworth and Shelley could explain
the transformation of Lurie’s worldview – a worldview that has been articulated by
several animal rights activists, including Jane Goodall: ‘Together the chimpanzees and
the baboons and monkeys, the birds and insects, the teeming life of the vibrant forest,
the stirrings of the never still waters of the great lake, and the uncountable stars and
planets of the solar system formed one whole. All one, all part of the great mystery. And
I was part of it too’ (2000, 81).

4
As novels that examine the ontological status of animals vis-à-vis humans, Kundera’s
The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Coetzee’s Disgrace are linked by their
interextuality. Julia Kristeva, who prefers the term ‘transposition’ to ‘intertextuality’,
says that that word transposition ‘specifies that the passage from one signifying system
to another demands a new articulation of the thetic – of enunciative and denotative
positionality’ (1984, 59–60). By transposing the name Karenin from Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina, Kundera has introduced a tragic dimension to his text. Apart from the
human tragedy in the Kundera novel, occasioned by a combination of fate and political
contingency, we are confronted with the suffering and death of the dog Karenin. In a
similar manner, we witness how intertextual elements in Coetzee’s Disgrace create new
denotative and connotative possibilities in the text. Coetzee is a notoriously intertextual
writer, as several critics have observed. Stephen Watson, for example, has written, ‘It
is not simply that he is the most bookish of all authors in South Africa. Quotation is
basic to his fictional practice’ (2001, 24). The first time we are introduced to the theme
of euthanasia is through Lurie, who acts as the focalizer of the author’s thoughts. The
animals are euthanized because ‘There are simply too many of them’ (p. 142). This line
is echoed a few pages later when, once again, using Lurie as his focalizer the writer
says: ‘The dogs are brought to the clinic because they are unwanted: because we are
too menny’ (p. 146). The italicized text and the misspelling of the word ‘many’ alerts
us to the tragic context of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, where the preternaturally
mature child, Father Time, writes this line in a suicide note before hanging his two
siblings and himself, because he feels that three of them have become more than a
handful for their troubled parents (Hardy 1995, 298). The point of these intertextual
resonances in Kundera’s and Coetzee’s text is that they have been transposed from
their original human contexts to animal contexts, thus forging a nexus between animal
suffering and the human predicament.
Another powerful intertextual resonance in Disgrace which conjoins the fate of
humans and animals has been pointed out by Michiel Heyns. When Lucy and Lurie
contemplate their bleak future after their traumatic experience on the farm, Lurie uses
the simile ‘Like a dog’ (p. 205) to denote their lives of deprivation. Lucy then echoes
her father: ‘Yes, like a dog’. These words, Heyns reminds us, are uttered by Joseph K.
in Kafka’s The Trial (2002, 63). This intellectually astute manoeuvre by Coetzee echoes
the absurdity of the protagonist’s death in Kafka’s puzzling novel, which is paralleled
not only by the meaninglessness of Lucy’s rape and Lurie’s assault, but also the futility
of the lives of the animals that Lurie has to put down. The trope of dying ‘like a dog’
applies to the human condition as well as the animal condition.
Lurie, an agnostic or possibly an atheist by persuasion, comes to accept that dogs
have souls. One of the meanings of the word ‘soul’ according to the Oxford English
Dictionary is the moral or emotional or intellectual nature of a person or animal. Through
his own predicament, Lurie is transformed to accepting the notion of animal souls.

86 Harry Sewlall
Contemplating the fate of the animals in their last moments, he thinks: ‘Something
happens in this room, something unmentionable: here the soul is yanked out of the
body; briefly it hangs about in the air, twisting and contorting; then it is sucked away
and is gone. It will be beyond him, this room that is not a room but a hole where one
leaks out of existence. (p. 219)
In Kundera’s novel, moments before Tomas administers the lethal injection to
Karenin, the dog licks Tereza’s face ‘two more times’ (p. 293), and Tereza whispers to
the animal: ‘Don’t be scared, don’t be scared, you won’t feel any pain there, you’ll dream
of squirrels and rabbits, you’ll have cows there, and Mefisto [Karenin’s friend, the pig]
will be there, don’t be scared …’ (p. 294). Tereza’s ministrations to Karenin moments
before he is euthanized remind us of Bev Shaw at the animal clinic in Disgrace: ‘To
each, in what will be its last minutes, Bev gives her fullest attention, stroking it, talking
to it, easing its passage’ (p. 142). Any dog owner, who has witnessed the last moments
of the death of an animal at the hands of a veterinarian, will recognize such moments
in the texts by Kundera and Coetzee – moments that are too uncannily similar not to
warrant full citation:
Tomas jabbed the needle into the vein and pushed the plunger. Karenin’s leg jerked; his
breath quickened for a few seconds, then stopped. Tereza remained on the floor by the couch
and buried her face in his head. (p. 294)
Nevertheless, [Lurie] is the one who holds the dog as still as the needle finds the vein and the
drug hits the heart and the legs buckle and the eyes dim. (p. 142)
The postulation of an animal soul and of a life hereafter is common to both Kundera’s
and Coetzee’s novels. If religious texts give promise of a life hereafter for human
characters, why not a similar future for animal characters, these novels seem to ask.
Where the views of Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Kundera the novelist intersect is in
their interrogation of the legacy of traditional Western philosophy in its marginalization
of non-humans and the privileging of the intellect over the imaginative and affective
dimension of a human being. In The Art of the Novel, first published in French in 1986,
Kundera gives expression to this phenomenon of our modern age. Referring to Edmund
Husserl’s concern about the crisis facing European humanity, Kundera locates this crisis
‘in Galileo and Descartes, in the one-sided nature of the European sciences, which
reduced the world to a mere object of technical and mechanical investigation and put
the concrete world of life, die Lebenswelt as [Husserl] called it, beyond their horizon’
(Kundera [1986] 1993, 3). The following passage from Kundera’s critique of Descartes
resonates with the voice of Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello: ‘Once elevated by Descartes
to “master and proprietor of nature,” man has now become a mere thing to the forces (of
technology, of politics, of history) that bypass him, surpass him, possess him’ (Kundera
[1986] 1993, 4).

5
Derek Attridge, in his monograph titled J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, posits
the notion that if Lucy, Petrus and Melanie represent the others that David Lurie either
struggles or fails to understand, then ‘animals are others who he knows he cannot
begin to know’ (p. 184). What for Lurie once represented ‘the absolute other of the
animal’, becomes a focal point in his transformation as a human being and teaches
him, in the words of Attridge, ‘about love as a path to grace’ (p. 190). The trajectory of
Lurie’s transformation from a cynic to an empathetic human being within the textual
space of a novel reflects, microcosmically, the evolutionary change in the worldview
of philosophers to the status of the animal in general over many centuries. Matthew
Calarco, typifying the present generation of thinkers who find the human/animal polarity
untenable, writes:
… the locus and stakes of the human-animal distinction are almost always political and
ethical [author’s emphasis]. For not only does the distinction create the opening for the
exploitation of nonhuman animals and others considered not fully human (this is the point
that is forcefully made by animal ethicists), but it also creates the conditions for contemporary
biopolitics, in which more and more of the ‘biological’ and ‘animal’ aspects of human life are
brought under the purview of the State and the juridical order. (2008, 94)
Kundera’s novel illustrates how the human/animal distinction is erased when political
stakes override ethical ones. When the general populace of Czechoslovakia lose all faith
in Communism and Russia, the invaders seek out political lackeys who are indoctrinated
to ‘cultivate’ and ‘maintain’ an ‘aggressiveness’ which they ‘practise’ on animals (p.
280). Before the Czech citizens are removed from their jobs, arrested and put on trial,
a concerted hate campaign is first orchestrated against the pigeons and then the dogs:
‘. . . [R]adio, television, and the press went on and on about dogs: how they soil our
streets and parks, endanger our children’s health, fulfil no useful function, yet must be
fed. They whipped up such a psychotic fever that Tereza had been afraid that the crazed
mob would do harm to Karenin (p. 281).
Coetzee’s creation, Elizabeth Costello, tells her audience that between ‘1942 and
1945 several million people were put to death in the concentration camps of the Third
Reich’ (2000, 19). Her point is that a mentality which shows little regard for non-humans
is capable of inflicting such horror as the world witnessed in the Holocaust. Such a
comparison might seem excessive with the unintended consequence of trivializing the
fate of the victims. Matthew Calarco is sensitive to this criticism, hence his qualification:
‘In view of the scope and consequences of the Nazi Holocaust, giving even minor
attention to the mistreatment of animals in the political and philosophical context might
appear at first blush to be highly questionable . . .’ (2008, 110). However, the real issue
that Costello is raising, and one which is endorsed by Kundera’s novel, is that the
persecution of non-humans and humans comes from a mindset that has no empathy
with either humans or non-humans. Jane Goodall expressed a similar sentiment in an

88 Harry Sewlall
interview: that the kind of science that divorced empathy from the study of animals was
the kind of science that created the Nazis (Goodall Jane 2010).
One of the enduring orthodoxies that perpetuated the human/non-human binary has
been the fraught, if not illogical issue of language. Giorgio Agamben debunks this age-
old non sequitur: ‘What distinguishes man from animal is language, but this is not a
natural given already inherent in the psychophysical structure of man; it is, rather, a
historical production, which, as such, can be properly assigned neither to man nor to
animal. If this element is taken away, the difference between man and animal vanishes
. . .’ (2004, 36). How such a difference between man and animal is erased is remarkably
illustrated by Jane Goodall in her study on chimpanzees in East Africa. Goodall offers
a touching anecdote of how she once offered a nut to a chimpanzee she named David.
David dropped the nut but gently held her hand to reassure her that although he did
not want the nut, he appreciated her gesture. Goodall’s conclusion is that they ‘had
communicated in a language far more ancient than words, a language that we shared
with our prehistoric ancestor, a language bridging our two worlds’ (2000, 81).
Returning specifically to the figure of the canine, it is a matter of concern to animal
ethicists that man’s best friend is sometimes represented as a root metaphor for societal
malaise, especially in communities where human life is also regarded as cheap. One such
example would be the caption of a news report taken from the respected South African
weekly newspaper, Mail & Guardian. Titled ‘The dog is dead’, the report goes on to quote
a resident from the sprawling informal settlement of Khayelitsha in the Western Cape,
the scene of the vigilante execution of Andile Mtsholo, a 32-year old accused of stealing
a cellphone: ‘The dog is dead and we will walk freely with our cellphones now’ (Mail &
Guardian 22–28 June 2012). The opprobrium evoked by the use of the image of a ‘dog’
is matched by the gruesome manner of the man’s execution, namely, by ‘necklacing’ –
a peculiarly South African coinage from the so-called ‘struggle era’ against apartheid,
which refers to the placing of a tyre around the neck of a victim accused of collaborating
with the apartheid regime, who may be conscious or semi-conscious after a beating, and
setting it alight. Apart from recalling Ndebele’s deprecation of the figure of the dog as
a metaphor of our own brutalization, we are reminded of the brutal killing of the dogs
by the would-be rapists in Coetzee’s Disgrace. That the dog symbolizes the oppressive
machinery of apartheid in the minds of many South Africans, as Coetzee evokes in
his novel, is reassuringly counterbalanced by the close bond that exists between the
canine and some people in even impoverished communities in South Africa. It is not an
uncommon sight in rural areas to find a scraggy dog, like the one depicted on the cover
of Coetzee’s first edition of Disgrace, following its master faithfully.
Stephen Mulhall, who has engaged robustly with the different facets of Elizabeth
Costello’s lecture on animal rights in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and
Elizabeth Costello, attempts to forge a rapprochement between analytical philosophy,
as inaugurated by Plato, and literary discourse. In the manner of Costello, he argues:
‘[There] are other forms of critical reflection as well – ones with which we are perhaps

more familiar in extraphilosophical contexts, but which are no less concerned to deepen
our understanding and enrich our thought by embodying certain kinds of affective
response to things, and inviting us to share those responses, as well as to critically
evaluate them’ (2009, 9).
It is in the domain of the affective – our human ability to empathize with creatures
other than ourselves – that the appeal of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of
Being and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace resides. The dog in Kundera and Coetzee represents
the non-human world with which humans need to connect in order to fully realize their
humanity, as Ndebele has proposed. Logic alone cannot account for the actions of
David Lurie at the animal clinic, or the ministrations of Tomas and Tereza to their dying
Karenin. Together these novels open up avenues for alternative critical reflection on
the relationship between non-humans and humans. By positing the existence of animal
souls, Kundera and Coetzee not only create the epistemological and ecological spaces
to interrogate our attitude to what has traditionally been considered our ultimate Other,
but also – in defiance of the ‘abyssal rupture’ that Derrida has posited between humans
and animals (2002, 398) – to conjoin the fate of humans and non-humans.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, we have come a long way since the
days when ‘Aristotle thought that animals exist for the sake of more rational humans, to
provide them with food and clothing’ (Singer 2004, Preface, xi). Despite the manifest
cruelties inflicted on animals in the name of science and commercial enterprise,
‘something new’ (ibid.) has happened, according to animal activist and contemporary
philosopher, Peter Singer. This new phenomenon is the emergence of philosophers who
have ‘mounted a strong challenge to the traditional view of the status of nonhuman
animals’ (ibid.). Among such scholars are Australians Michael Allen Fox and Lesley
McLean who argue ‘for the need to open up a phenomenological and conceptual space
within which to establish a human/nonhuman world of interaction. More specifically
. . .we should interpret and understand what they are telling us – by means of their
expressions, behaviour and psychological abilities’ (2008, 147).
Note
1 In memory of my dogs Coco and Brandy and the happy times we spent together.
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North West University

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are characterized by the kind of philosophical excursions which become emblematic

René Descartes (1596–1650), arguably the most formidable philosophical and

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important epistemological construct in the novel, contributing to its thematic lightness

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Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

____. 2003. Elizabeth Costello. London: Secker.

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