danta-chris--“like-a-dog-like-a-lamb”--becoming-sacrificial-animal-in-kafka-and-coetzee--essay...

New Literary History, 2007, 38: 721–737

“Like a dog . . . like a lamb”:Becoming Sacrificial Animal in

Kafka and Coetzee∗

Chris Danta

The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being be-comes is not.

—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

If you have hitherto been a man, with a man’s life, may you henceforth be a dog with a dog’s life.

—J. M. Coetzee, Slow Man

I. Scapegoat: The Narrative Animal

Some two years before he died, Franz Kafka wrote a long letter to Max Brod, which forms a kind of literary theoretical testament. Toward the end of this July 5, 1922 letter, Kafka defines the writer with a startling metaphor: “The definition of a writer, of such a writer, and the explanation of his effectiveness, to the extent that he has any: He is the scapegoat [der Sündenbock] of mankind. He makes it possible for men to enjoy sin [eine Sünde] without guilt, almost without guilt.”1 How should we read this enigmatic statement? In his recent book K., Roberto Calasso picks up on the characteristic irony of the final qualification: “Painful, abysmal irony in that ‘almost without guilt’: a nod to the illusory innocence of the pleasure that binds every reader of literature.”2 That “almost without guilt” surely echoes Kafka’s famous pronouncement to Brod that there “is an infinite amount of hope—but not for us.”3 Yet, in its haste to assert how Kafkan irony works to expose “the illusory innocence of the pleasure that binds every reader of literature,” Calasso’s comment also ironically

∗ I am grateful to Paul Patton, Peter Alexander, Lars Eckstein, Sue Kossew, Dimitris Vardoulakis, Paul Sheehan, and the readers at New Literary History for their helpful remarks on earlier drafts of this essay.

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works to neutralize Kafka’s disturbing metaphor. Taking Kafka to be “painfully,” “abysmally” ironic thus comes at the cost of taking seriously his metaphorical reference to the animal. As Walter Benjamin noted in 1934, in an essay commemorating the tenth anniversary of Kafka’s death: “It is possible to read Kafka’s animal stories for quite a while without realizing that they are not about human beings at all.”4 It is now well established in Kafka scholarship that the critic anthropomorphizes Kafka’s animals at his or her own risk.5 But how should we respond to Kafka explicitly comparing the writer to an animal, if not by taking him to be ironic? How to respond seriously, moreover, given that the animal Kafka compares to the writer in this instance—the scapegoat—is a half-invented or a mythical one?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, William Tindale apparently invented the word scapegoat in his 1530 translation of the Bible to express what he believed to be the literal meaning of the Hebrew azazel, occurring only in Leviticus 16:8, 10, and 26. In Lev. 16:8, Tindale followed the interpretation of the Vulgate by rendering “the goate on which the lotte fell to scape.”6 Biblical scholarship, however, continues to puzzle over the meaning of the Hebrew. According to the most widely accepted hypothesis, Azazel is the proper name or epithet of a desert demon; but, according to another etymology, it is a geographical designation meaning “precipitous place” or “rugged cliff.”7 What makes the scapegoat an ambivalent term of comparison even beyond this etymological intrigue is that it refers to an animal whose identity comes to be determined by the human drama in which it is forced to participate. As part of the Mosaic ritual of the Day of Atonement (or Yom Kippur) outlined in Leviticus 16, Aaron is instructed to cast lots for two male goats. While he is to sacrifice “the goat whose lot falls to the Lord” for a sin offering (Lev. 16:9), “the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat [or the goat for Azazel] shall be presented alive before the Lord to be used for making atonement by sending it into the desert as a scapegoat [or a goat for Azazel]” (Lev. 16:10).8 The scapegoat is so called because it symbolically takes on the sins of the human community in order to bear them away with it as it “escapes” into the desert. From this we get the figurative meaning of the word, first recorded in 1824: “one who is blamed or punished for the sins of others” (OED).

Whether by dint of an unfortunate translation by Tindale, the word scapegoat nonetheless attests in the most economic fashion possible to the embeddedness of the animal within the story of human identity. Insofar as the scapegoat injects animality into the drama of human salvation, it might be considered the narrative animal par excellence. Given that the sins of the community are also the stories of the community, the scapegoat’s sacrificial journey into the wilderness may be viewed as

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opening up a figurative space between the human and the animal, the very irreducibility of which allows for narrative itself to unfold. The sins (or the stories) of the community enter into the body of the scapegoat so as to become finite and pass away; the scapegoat thereby identifies the suffering body of the sacrificial animal as the starting point or condition of possibility for a story. As I aim to establish, however, such a story demands to be told from the side of the animal rather than the human. Moreover, it is pre-Christian in the sense that it does not yet refer the expiation of all sin to the suffering body of Christ. The writer becomes the scapegoat (and the scapegrace) of humanity, I argue, by recalling us to the sacrificial animal’s intractable involvement in the production of narrative. In metaphorically envisaging the writer as the “scapegoat of mankind,” Kafka seeks to preserve the distance and difference between the animal and the human as intrinsic to the act of writing and to the construction of a story.

To reduce this difference and this distance too quickly to naught, I would suggest, is a mistake René Girard makes in his groundbreaking analysis of the scapegoat mechanism. “In a general study of sacrifice there is little reason to differentiate between human and animal victims,” writes Girard in Violence and the Sacred. “[A]ll victims, animal or human, must be treated in the same fashion if we wish to apprehend the criteria by which victims are selected (if indeed such criteria exist) and discover (if such a thing is possible) a universal principle for their selection.”9 By immediately equating the human victim with the animal victim, Girard too neatly collapses the metaphorical distance the scapegoat establishes between the human and the animal. He refuses to imagine the (literary or imaginative) possibility of the animal victim having its own story to tell. He thereby forgets that in the hands of one such as Kafka—that is, according to a certain literary way of thinking—the word scapegoat requires the story of violence also to be told from the side of the animal victim or, if you like, from the point of view of our own animality.

If nothing else, Kafka’s metaphorical reference to the scapegoat unset-tles Girard’s ready identification of the human with the animal instance of persecution. As John Berger avers in his influential 1977 essay “Why Look at Animals?”: “No animal confirms man, either positively or negatively.”10 The simple reason for this is that animals (even those we encounter in modern zoos) are not merely objects of the human gaze, but also beings for which the human is something to perceive and perhaps even marvel at. In a suggestive expansion of Berger’s position, Jacques Derrida notes in his 1999 essay, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” that animals (even domestic ones) unsettle humans precisely by gazing upon them. For Derrida, to acknowledge the animal is first of all to grant the possibility of being seen by an animal. “There are those texts signed


by people who have no doubt seen, observed, analysed, reflected on the animal,” he remarks, “but who have never been seen seen by the animal. Their gaze has never intersected with that of an animal directed at them. . . . They neither wanted nor had the capacity to draw any systematic consequence from the fact that an animal could, facing them, look at them, clothed or naked, and in a word, without a word, address them. They have taken no account of the fact that what they call animal could look at them and address them from down there, from a wholly other origin.”11 For Derrida, literature plays a vital role in accounting for the address of the animal because it allows us to imagine a point of view outside the human. As he notes, “thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry.”12

By appealing poetically to the figure of the scapegoat, Kafka attributes the writer with a perspective somehow foreign or eccentric to the human. But the properly Kafkan question, “What is it like to be a scapegoat?” still differs fundamentally from the question philosopher Thomas Nagel asks in his famous 1974 article, “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?” At stake in the former is not the possibility of a scientific or philosophical form of identification with a particular animal (a bat) but rather the possibility of a metaphorical or literary identification with animals more generally. The scapegoat, I have been suggesting, is the animal whose identity no longer coincides with purely zoological taxonomies, but instead becomes bound up in a very real way with the experience of human finitude. The scapegoat is loaded up with the sins of the human community so as to carry them safely away from the polis. What renders sin finite in this process is the fact that it becomes identified with the body of the abandoned animal.

At the bottom of Kafka’s metaphor of the writer-scapegoat is a profound claim about the relation of literary narrative to bodily death. To explicate this claim, we must return to our starting point. Early on in his 1922 letter to Brod, Kafka reflects upon literature’s necessarily imposturous relation to real death by putting the writer’s terrible anguish before death into the form of an interior monologue, which runs as follows:

What I have playacted is really going to happen. I have not bought myself off by my writing. I died my whole life long and now I will really die. My life was sweeter than other peoples’ and my death will be more terrible by the same degree. Of course the writer in me will die right away, since such a figure has no base, no substance, is less than dust. He is only barely possible in the broil of earthly life, is only a construct of sensuality. That is your writer for you. But I myself cannot go on living because I have not lived, I have remained clay, I have not blown the spark into the fire, but only used it to light up my corpse.13


As Maurice Blanchot glosses this remarkable passage: “to write is to put oneself outside life, it is to take pleasure in one’s death through an imposture that will become a frightening reality.”14 Kafka thinks the writer avoids the fact of his own death so comprehensively that his real self never actually comes to life and so remains a corpse. “It will be a strange burial,” he continues to Brod, “the writer insubstantial as he is, consigning the old corpse, the longtime corpse, to the grave. I am enough of a writer to appreciate the scene with all my senses, or—and it is the same thing—to want to describe it with total self-forgetfulness—not alertness, but self-forgetfulness is the writer’s first prerequisite.”15 For Kafka, the paradoxical task of literature is to describe how the writer’s real self—which has not yet lived, which has remained a corpse—is con-signed to the grave. What is particularly significant for our purposes is that the animal plays a vital role in this process. According to Calasso: “That abandoned body, that living corpse, that ‘forever corpse’ whose ‘strange burial’ the writer is quick to observe, is the shaman’s body, inani-mate and motionless as his spirit travels widely, among the branches of the tree of the world, in the company of animals and other supernatural assistants.”16 But one might equally say that “that abandoned body, that living corpse” is the scapegoat, that is, the sacrificial animal whose body the human community first appropriates and then expels into the desert in order to expiate its sense of guilt.

On this (more literal) reading of Kafka’s letter to Brod, the writer becomes humanity’s scapegoat by describing with total self-forgetfulness the way in which human society abandons the body of the animal at the moment of consecrating its existence. The writer takes up the perspec-tive of the abandoned animal by imagining what it is like to become a corpse—or an abandoned body. Literature, writes Blanchot in “Literature and the Right to Death,” wants “Lazarus in the tomb and not Lazarus brought back into the daylight, the one who already smells bad.”17 In what follows, it will be a matter of recognizing how the animal’s address becomes most arresting when it recalls me to the fact of my own death-bound subjectivity. As Derrida reflects on the experience of being seen (naked) by his pet cat in “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow)”: “Nothing can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualised. And a mortal existence, for from the moment it has a name, its name survives it. It signs its potential disappearance. Mine also, and this disappearance, from that moment to this, fort/da, is announced each time that, naked or not, one of us leaves the room.”18

Rather than investigate this connection between the experiences of animality and personal finitude solely or directly in relation to Kafka’s narratives, in what follows I propose to establish it as an interpretive lens


for the recent fiction of J. M. Coetzee. Kafka’s influence on Coetzee is oft-remarked in the critical literature and well expressed by the title of Patricia Merivale’s 1996 essay, “Audible Palimpsests: Coetzee’s Kafka.”19 Coetzee, who has been reading Kafka in the German since he was an adolescent, has been quick to acknowledge the debt himself. He remarks to David Attwell in Doubling the Point: “I acknowledge [the impact of Kafka on my fiction] . . . with what I hope is the proper humility. As a writer I am not worthy to loose the latchet of Kafka’s shoe. But I have no regrets about the use of the letter K in Michael K, hubris though it may seem. There is no monopoly on the letter K.”20 What justifies the particular detour I am suggesting, beyond Coetzee’s abiding interest in the question of the scapegoat (and the letter K), is the idiosyncratic engagement with Kafka he constructs through his fictional author character Elizabeth Costello—first in the 1999 text The Lives of Animals and then in the 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. For Coetzee (as for Blanchot before him), Kafka denominates the exigencies of writing. As he explains to Attwell in the above-mentioned interview: “I work on a writer like Kafka because he opens for me, or opens me to, moments of analytic intensity. . . . Is this a comment about reading, about the intensity of the reading process? Not really. Rather, it is a comment about writing, the kind of writing-in-the-tracks one does in criticism. . . . No intensity of reading that I can imagine would succeed in guiding me through Kafka’s verb-labyrinth: to do that I would once again have to take up the pen and, step by step, write my way after him.”21 In a sense, what Coetzee does with Elizabeth Costello is to take up his pen and, step by step, write his way after Kafka, which is to say, follow him into the labyrinthine burrow of writing. As we shall see, writing thus becomes a creaturely pursuit: when Costello appeals to the example of Kafka’s animal stories in order to counter Nagel’s doubts about whether we can have knowledge of other animals’ minds, when she develops her countervailing claim that “there are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination,”22 she also positions the writer in a particularly Kafkan manner. My aim in following Costello’s often-at-tenuated musings on the lives of animals is thus to clarify how the writer is able to identify him- or herself as humanity’s scapegoat.

II. What Is It Like to Be a Scapegoat?— Elizabeth Costello and Red Peter

The two Tanner Lectures on Human Values that Coetzee delivered at Princeton University on October 15 and 16, 1997 (and subsequently published as The Lives of Animals) must have tested the sympathetic imagination of their audience. Rather than taking a straightforwardly


academic form, they tell in third-person present tense the fictional story of the Australian writer, Elizabeth Costello—like Coetzee, a famous novelist from the Southern Hemisphere who has been invited to give two lectures at an American college and who decides to speak about the treatment of animals. At no point does Coetzee try to conceal the fact that it is Kafka who authorizes him to link the question of the animal to the question of writing in such a bold and self-reflexive way. Indeed, Costello’s surprising opening gambit in the first of her Gates lectures, “The Philosophers and the Animals,” is to mimic the concluding gesture of Kafka in his letter to Brod. Although she will later declare herself to be neither a scholar nor a devotee of Kafka, she begins by comparing herself as a writer to one of Kafka’s fictive creatures.

Ladies and Gentlemen. . . . It is two years since I last spoke in the United States. In the lecture I then gave, I had reason to refer to the great fabulist Franz Kafka, and in particular to his story “Report to an Academy,” about an educated ape, Red Peter, who stands before the members of a learned society telling the story of his life—of his ascent from beast to something approaching man. On that occasion I felt a little like Red Peter myself and said so. Today the feeling is even stronger, for reasons that I hope will become clearer to you.

Lectures often begin with lighthearted remarks whose purpose is to set the audience at ease. The comparison I have just drawn between myself and Kafka’s ape might be taken as such a lighthearted remark. . . .

I want to say at the outset that that was not how my remark—the remark that I feel like Red Peter—was intended. I did not intend it ironically. It means what it says. I say what I mean. I am an old woman. I do not have the time any longer to say things I do not mean.23

Here, then, Costello confronts her audience at Appleton College with the same problem we have encountered in Kafka’s letter to Brod: how not to take as ironic the writer who willfully compares herself to a fic-tive animal?

What is immediately remarkable—and for some readers faintly ridiculous—about the character of Elizabeth Costello is that she transforms the phenomenon of authorial performance itself into a kind of zoological spectacle. “I am not a philosopher of mind,” she demurs at one point, “but an animal exhibiting, yet not exhibiting, to a gathering of scholars, a wound, which I cover up under my clothes but touch on in every word I speak.”24 As a staunch advocate of animal affectivity, Costello views truth as originating in physical rather than intellectual experience. For this reason, she would surely condone what Kafka wrote in his diaries on February 1, 1922: “Looked at with a primitive eye, the real, incontestable truth, a truth marred by no external circumstance (martyrdom, sacrifice of oneself for the sake of another), is only physical


pain.”25 As philosopher Cora Diamond notes: “[Costello] is a woman haunted by the horror of what we do to animals. We see her as wounded by this knowledge, this horror, and by the knowledge of how unhaunted others are. The wound marks her and isolates her.”26 What isolates Costello from the academic community, thereby rendering her a kind of outcast, is her insistence upon a physical form of identification with animals. She encapsulates her own position in valorizing the animal poetry of Ted Hughes: “With Hughes,” she says, “it is a matter . . . not of inhabiting another mind but of inhabiting another body.”27

According to Costello, then, understanding other animals does not require a philosophy of mind so much as a philosophy of body. She upholds Kafka’s story—and literature more generally—for the profound ways in which it sparks our physical imaginations and so enables us to inhabit another body. She muses: “Kafka had time to wonder where and how his poor educated ape was going to find a mate. And what it was going to be like when he was left in the dark with the bewildered, half-tamed female that his keepers eventually produced for his use. Kafka’s ape is embedded in life. It is the embeddedness that is important, not the life itself. His ape is embedded as we are embedded, you in me, I in you. That ape is followed through to the end, to the bitter unsayable end.”28 Rather than “embedded in life,” I would say embedded in narrative; for one way to grasp the embeddedness of Kafka’s ape is to see him as a scapegoat in the restricted sense of the term I have been developing: that is, as a narrative animal. Like “the goate on which the lotte fell to scape” in Leviticus 16, Red Peter’s identity is determined by what has happened to him since coming into contact with humans—that is, by his acrobatic traversal of the apparently abysmal gap separating the animal from the human.29 Significantly, what initiates the marvelous event of Red Peter becoming human is an act of human violence: a hunting expedition from the company of the famous German animal trader, Carl Hagenbeck, attacked and captured him as he drank with a troop of apes at a water hole in the Gold Coast.30 As he relates to the members of the Academy: “I was the only one that was hit; I was hit in two places. Once in the cheek; a slight wound; but it left a large, naked, red scar which earned me the name of Red Peter. . . . The second shot hit me below the hip. It was a severe wound, it is the cause of my limping a little to this day.”31

Costello identifies with the physical suffering of Kafka’s ape. She thinks, “Red Peter was not an investigator of primate behaviour but a branded, marked, wounded animal presenting himself as speaking testimony to a gathering of scholars.”32 On this view, what conditions the possibility of his narrative is not so much his amazing mimetic capacity as his near-fatal wounding. Insofar as he addresses the distinguished members


of his audience (all of whom remain ironically silent throughout the monologue), it is only to remind them of the sacrificial origin of the species: that is, the physical wound that commemorates the animal’s passage to humanity. In this sense, “A Report to an Academy” can be read as the scapegoat returning to tell its own story, which is the story of the uniquely human need to abandon or disavow the body of the animal in order to accede to the cultural. As Red Peter himself explains: “With an effort which up till now has never been repeated [by any other animal] I managed to reach the cultural level of an average European.”33

One might say that at stake in Kafka’s stories is thus the recovery of a precultural or an animal perspective. In their influential Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari claim that Kafka’s narratives “are essentially animalistic even though there aren’t animals in all of them.” This is because “[a]ccording to Kafka, the animal is the object par excellence of the story: to try to find a way out, to trace a line of escape.”34 Without essentially disputing Deleuze and Guattari’s claim, I am complicating it somewhat by suggesting that it is not simply the animal but more precisely the scapegoat—“the goate on which the lotte fell to scape”—that is the object par excellence of the Kafkan story. I am wondering, in other words, what it means for an author to ask his or her reader to inhabit a wounded or a sacrificial body. In his report, Red Peter is careful to explain that it was not freedom he sought in becoming human but merely a way out (of his cage). “Until [being captured] I had had so many ways out of everything and now I had none. . . . I had no way out but I had to devise one, for without it I could not live. . . . I deliberately do not use the word ‘freedom.’. . . No, freedom is not what I wanted. Only a way out; right or left, or in any direction; I made no other demand.”35 As Deleuze and Guattari gloss this: “for Kafka, the animal essence is the way out, the line of escape, even if it takes place in place, or in a cage.”36 Indeed, Red Peter escapes into the human by remaining in his place, by rendering his cage metaphorical. But, in so doing, he continues to testify to the sacrifice of animal life involved in becoming human: “to put it plainly: your life as apes, gentleman, cannot be further removed from you than mine is from me.”37 In some sense, Red Peter’s claim to be human thus derives from his ability to invoke the “longtime corpse” of his animal being.

To the extent that Red Peter learns how to inhabit a human body—by imbibing schnapps, for example—he is forced to give up the freedom of movement he formerly enjoyed as an animal. In this sense, he comes to embody a remark Kafka once made to Gustav Janouch: “Every man lives behind bars, which he carries within him. That is why people write so much about animals now. It’s an expression of longing for a free natural life. But for human beings the natural life is a human life. But


men don’t realise it. Human existence is a burden for them, so they dispose of it in fantasies.”38 Red Peter—qua scapegoat—reveals the human longing for a free natural (or animal) life to be pure fantasy: a veritable disavowal of the human. As he comes to understand the hard way, being human means having to accept one’s solitary confinement. It involves interiorizing the bars of the cage and performing the movement-in-a-place that is a report to an academy.

Peter F. Neumeyer has claimed that Kafka borrowed his central im-age for “A Report to an Academy” from Oskar Weber’s 1914 memoir, Der Zuckerbaron: Schicksale eines ehemaligen deutschen Offiziers in Südamerika (The Sugar Baron: The Adventures of a Former German Officer in South America). This is a book of which Kafka strangely wrote in a 1916 postcard to Felice Bauer: it “affects me so deeply it is about myself, or as if it were the book of rules [Vorschrift] for my life.”39 At one point in the brief memoir, Weber vividly describes shooting an ape while on a pleasure-hunting expedition. “[The ape] I shot . . . from a low palm-tree, fell, still alive, and sat exactly like a man with his back against the trunk. He pressed his left hand against the wound on his chest and looked at me almost reproachfully with big, dark eyes, which protruded from his fear-distorted face; at the same time he screamed and whimpered like a child and searched with his right hand for leaves, which he picked up off the ground, to staunch his wound.”40 There are obvious similarities between Kafka’s and Weber’s accounts of the wounded ape. What lends pathos to them both is the fact that the animal anthropomorphizes after being severely wounded—that is to say, at the point of losing the real freedom of animal movement. Kafka’s great achievement as a writer is to follow this insight to its “bitter unsayable end”: to view anthropomor-phosis of any kind as a (self-)sacrificial movement, resulting in a certain immobilization of the animal body. Think, for example, of the end of “The Hunger Artist” where the hunger artist dies and a young panther takes his place in the circus cage. Here, in a way that is reminiscent of the end of The Metamorphosis, the vitality of animal life is allowed to return only after the “longtime corpse” of the hunger artist has been consigned to the grave.

In their reading of “A Report to an Academy,” Deleuze and Guattari crucially fail to ask what it means to become—or to inhabit the body of—a sacrificial or a wounded animal. They never consider how the scapegoat might become the point of the Kafkan story—or how the artist who treats the persecuted animal as the narrative object par excellence might become a hunger artist. It is Costello who recalls us to this problem: “If Red Peter took it upon himself to make the arduous descent from the silence of the beasts to the gabble of reason in the spirit of the scapegoat, the chosen one, then his amanuensis was a scapegoat from


birth, with a presentiment, a Vorgefühl, for the massacre of the chosen people that was to take place soon after his death.”41 For Kafka to have such a presentiment of the absolute violence of the Holocaust, he must first experience what it is like to be a scapegoat in a more restricted and private sense; he must experience the persecuted animal, that is, as it represents the way out or the movement-in-a-place that is his own death. It is fascinating to note in this regard that when Kafka was dying of tuberculosis he referred to the consuming cough as the “animal” in him, thereby figuring the animal as a mortal wound.42

Acknowledging the striking example of Kafka’s life and fiction emboldens Costello to ground identification with animals in the possibility of imagining one’s own death. “For instants at a time,” she attests (in direct response to Nagel who claims that a bat is “a fundamentally alien form of life”),43

I know what it is like to be a corpse. The knowledge repels me. It fills me with terror; I shy away from it, refuse to entertain it.

All of us have such moments, particularly as we grow older. The knowledge we have is not abstract—“All human beings are mortal, I am a human being, therefore I am mortal”—but embodied. For a moment we are that knowledge. We live the impossible: we live beyond our death, look back on it, yet look back as only a dead self can. . . . Now I ask: if we are capable of thinking our own death, why on earth should we not be capable of thinking our way into the life of a bat?44

This vital but enigmatic passage seems to reference the argument of Ecclesiastes 3:19: “Man’s fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal.” Humans and animals share the same bodily fate: that of becoming a corpse. To the extent that the animal traces a line of escape or a way out for the human, each becoming-ani-mal of the human is also a becoming-corpse. Ultimately, the wound that Costello covers up under her clothes but touches on in every word she speaks is a real one: it is the wound of finitude.

III. “Like a dog . . . like a lamb”: Becoming Sacrificial Animal in Disgrace

To pursue the implications of becoming a sacrificial animal further, one might usefully turn to Coetzee’s 1999 Booker prize winning novel, Disgrace. In this work, significantly, Coetzee employs the notion of the scapegoat for secular ends: to figure an experience of sacrifice without redemption. When the novel’s main protagonist, David Lurie, visits his


daughter’s smallholding in the Eastern Province after being forced to resign his university post at Cape Town because of sexual misconduct, she explicitly compares him to the scapegoat in Leviticus 16. Lucy says to her father (significantly, just before the two are brutally attacked): “you are safely expelled. Your colleagues can breathe easy again, while the scapegoat wanders in the wilderness.” At first, Lurie does not know how to take this biblical analogy: “A statement? A question? Does she believe he is just a scapegoat?” He then responds with characteristic scepticism and irony:

I don’t think scapegoating is the best description. . . . Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious power behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat’s back and drove it out, and the city was cleansed. It worked because everyone knew how to read the ritual, including the gods. Then the gods died, and all of a sudden you had to cleanse the city without divine help. Real actions were demanded instead of symbolism. . . . Purgation was replaced by the purge. . . . Anyway . . . having said farewell to the city, what do I find myself doing in the wilderness? Doctoring dogs. Playing right-hand man to a woman who specialises in sterilization and euthanasia.45

In some sense, Lurie’s work with Bev Shaw in the animal clinic in Gra-hamstown euthanizing unwanted dogs is an acknowledgement—in the absence of the gods—that the purge has replaced purgation and that real actions are demanded instead of symbolism. What the practical and, for want of a better word, numerical problems of the clinic eventually reveal to Lurie is that the body of the modern sacrificial animal resists being appropriated for religious or symbolic ends. Lurie’s sympathetic treatment of the dead dogs (which are shown to be the true scapegoats of the modern polis) certainly puts him in a relation to his own death—but a relation to death that is so pure it is somehow unconcerned with the possibility of personal redemption or grace.46

The theological notion of grace—“the free and unmerited favour of God as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowing of blessings”47—is treated both furtively and ironically by Coetzee’s novel. As Derek Attridge has pointed out: “Buried in the novel’s title, with its specific references to the experiences of David Lurie and his daughter, and its vaguer references to the prevailing conditions in which they occur, is the word grace. . . . Grace is not, as it happens, the opposite of ‘disgrace.’ The opposite is something like ‘honour’; the OED definition of disgrace links it frequently with dishonour. Public shame, in other words, is con-trasted with, and can be cancelled by, public esteem, disgrace redeemed by honour.”48 This disjunction between grace and disgrace remains sig-nificant right up to the final scene of the novel. Even if Lurie begins to redeem his public shame by treating the abandoned dogs honourably in


death, this real action does not yet open onto the possibility of personal grace. For, like the author of Ecclesiastes, Lurie sees man’s fate as that of the animal; human and animal, in other words, remain ultimately unredeemed in death: “They flatten their ears, they droop their tails, as if they too feel the disgrace of dying; locking their legs, they have to be pulled or pushed or carried over the threshold” (D 143).

Disgrace ends by anticipating a reluctant scene of animal sacrifice: it leaves off with Lurie carrying an abandoned and crippled young male dog (which, significantly, he has refused to name) into the surgery of the animal clinic in order to euthanize it. Coetzee is enough of a writer to want to appreciate the scene with all his senses and describes Lurie’s treatment of the body of the abandoned animal with total self-forgetful-ness.

He opens the cage door. “Come,” he says, bends, opens his arms. The dog wags its crippled rear, sniffs his face, licks his cheeks, his lips, his ears. He does nothing to stop it. “Come.”

Bearing him in his arms like a lamb, he re-enters the surgery. “I thought you would save him for another week,” says Bev Shaw. “Are you giving him up?”

“Yes, I am giving him up.” (D 220)

Gently arresting our attention in this scene is the lyrical overdetermi-nation of the crippled, immobilized dog as a lamb. As Michael Marais observes: “The lamb image, here, suggests a sacrifice, a willing offering, to death”49—what Derrida calls a “gift of death.”50 In this regard, Lurie resembles the biblical patriarch Abraham, as he is about to sacrifice the ram in place of his beloved son Isaac in Genesis 22. At this ultimate moment in both stories, the abandoned body of the animal begins to figure the wound of finitude, as he who gives death to the scapegoat also enters into a relation to (his own) death.

“Yes, I am giving him up”: drawing upon all the potential indeterminacy of the third person singular pronoun, Lurie here identifies with the poetic image of the dog become a lamb. As Coetzee’s critics have been quick to note, the act of imaginatively inhabiting the body of the dog proves pivotal to the development of the two central characters in Disgrace. An earlier turning point in the novel occurs when Lucy compares her situ-ation to that of a dog after being viciously attacked and gang-raped on her smallholding by three black men (who she says acted “[l]ike dogs in a pack” [D 159]): “‘Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. . . . No cards, no weapons, no prop-erty, no dignity. . . . Like a dog’” (D 205). Lucy here echoes the end of The Trial where Josef K. dies in an uncomprehending state of disgrace, pronouncing “Like a dog!” so that the shame would outlive him.51 But Lurie’s final and momentary identification with the impending death of


the crippled dog in the animal clinic differs fundamentally from Lucy’s and from Josef K.’s; it no longer depends upon the animal essence (be-ing like a dog), but merely upon the narrative trajectory—or the line of escape—that the animal opens up in becoming a scapegoat. In contrast to Kafka’s metaphysical shame, which continues to leave man isolated, the “disgrace of dying” truly merges human and animal suffering.

IV. From Scapegoat to Scapegrace

Significantly, the word disgrace also implies physical deformity, which links the title of the novel to the favored, crippled dog in the animal clinic, whose “period of grace is almost over” (D 215). “As for grace, no regrettably no: I am not a Christian, or not yet,” remarks Coetzee to Attwell in Doubling the Point. The syntax of this sentence is undeniably Kafkan. So too is the sentiment of the following remark from the same interview (which echoes the entry from Kafka’s Diaries I have quoted above): “The body with its pain becomes a counter to the endless tri-als of doubt. . . . Not grace, then, but at least the body.”52 In Disgrace, Coetzee uses the address of the animal (body) to interrupt or suspend the human self’s passage towards an idealized or a consecrated state of being. In putting the dog to death, Lurie becomes aware that he too experiences the disgrace of dying, that the “longtime corpse” he so con-signs to the grave is in some sense his own, that what he has playacted is really going to happen.

Rather than a scapegoat, Lurie finally ends up a scapegrace: “one who escapes the grace of God.”53 Conditioning this escape is his overidentifi-cation with the suffering body—the prospective corpse—of the animal victim. As Paul Patton observes: “the favoured dog becomes everything that [Lurie] is now able to give up, including his honour, his intellectual pride and his attachment to life itself.”54 For an instant of time at the end of the novel, it is thus as if he knows what it is like to be a corpse.

He can save the young dog, if he wishes, for another week. But a time must come, it cannot be evaded, when he will have to bring him to Bev Shaw in her operating room (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 find 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 flames and see that it is burnt, burnt up. He will do that for him when his time comes. It will be little enough, less than little: nothing. (D 219–20)


Here, interrupting the thought of (personal) redemption, is Coetzee’s use of the perfective, a syntactic marker of aspect within the perfect tense “signifying an action carried through to its conclusion” (D 71). As Attwell comments in a review of Disgrace: “A more complete description of the perfective would note that the action has been carried through to its conclusion in the recent, rather than the distant, past and that its consequences are still very much in evidence.”55 If Coetzee’s syntax allows the young dog to escape into the temporal wilderness beyond the edge of the novel, it nonetheless reminds us that he will be “burnt, burnt up” in the near, rather than the distant, future. The scapegoat, I have been arguing, is above all else a sign of unredeemed finitude; each becom-ing-animal of the human is also a becoming-sacrificial-animal and, as such, a becoming-corpse. In the final scene of Disgrace, one might thus speak of Coetzee developing an eschatology of the perfective, that is, of the near future. What is shown to open the passage of narrative here is the suffering body of the scapegoat: the narrative animal, which, if it could ever return to the polis and become speaking testimony, would surely testify to the physical proximity of narrative to death. Such, at least, would be the atheological lesson of the scapegoat: “He who gives death enters into death.”56

University of New South Wales

NOTES

1 Franz Kafka, The Basic Kafka, ed. Erich Heller (New York: Washington Square Press, 1979), 295; Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902–1924, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken Books, 1958), 386.2 Roberto Calasso, K., trans. Geoffrey Brock (New York: Knopf, 2005), 117.3 Cited in Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 116.4 Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” 122.5 See Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” 111–41; Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 243–72; Elias Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice, trans. Christopher Middleton (London: Caldar and Boyars, 1974).6 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Scapegoat.” Jerome’s Vulgate translates azazel with caper emissarius (whence the French bouc émissaire). Here, azazel is read as a combination of ez (goat) and ozel (to go away, disappear): hence, literally “the goat that goes away.” Scapegoat does not appear in the revised version of 1884, which has Azazel as a proper name and “dismissal” in the margins as an alternative rendering. In 1535, Coverdale renders it: “the fre goate.”7 For a detailed discussion of contemporary debate about the word azazel, see Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, ed. Karol van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter van der Horst (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 240–48.8 All references are to the New International Version.


9 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (1977; London: Continuum, 2005), 10, 12. In keeping with this principle, Girard begins The Scapegoat not with Leviticus 16, but by discussing a massacre of Jews that took place in medieval France. Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986).10 John Berger, About Looking (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 3. 11 Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2001): 382.12 Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” 377.13 Kafka, Basic Kafka, 293–94.14 Maurice Blanchot, Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001), 261.15 Kafka, Basic Kafka, 294.16 Calasso, K., 116.17 Blanchot, The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), 327.18 Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” 379 (emphasis in original).19 Patricia Merivale, “Audible Palimpsests: Coetzee’s Kafka,” in Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee, ed. Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson (London: Macmillan, 1996), 152–67.20 J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), 199. Also of interest here is the provocative remark Nadine Gordimer makes in her 1984 New York Times review, “The Idea of Gardening: Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee,” reprinted in Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee, ed. Sue Kossew (New York: Hall and Co., 1998), 139–45: “Michael K (the initial probably stands for Kotze or Koekemoer and has no relation to Kafka) is not Everyman” (139). On the connection between Kafka and Coetzee around the theme of animals, see Josephine Donovan, “‘Miracles of Creation’: Animals in J. M. Coetzee’s Work,” Michigan Quarterly Review 43, no. 1 (2004): 78–93.21 Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 199.22 Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (Sydney: Vintage, 2003), 80; Coetzee et al., The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), 35.23 Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 62; The Lives of Animals, 18.24 Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 70–71; The Lives of Animals, 26.25 The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910–23, ed. Max Brod (1948; London: Vintage, 1999), 410.26 Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Reading Cavell, ed. Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh (London: Routledge, 2006), 99.27 Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 96.28 Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 32.29 For an account of the abysmal gap separating the animal from the human, see Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” 369–418. In this essay, Derrida takes seriously—that is, non-ironically—the event of his female cat seeing him naked.30 For an interesting discussion of some of the historical resonances of Kafka’s story, such as the appearance of speaking and schnapps-drinking apes in Carl Hagenbeck’s zoological gardens in Hamburg, see Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2002), esp. 189–94.31 Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” in Basic Kafka, 246–47.32 Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 70; The Lives of Animals, 26.33 Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” 254.34 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), 34.35 Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” 249.36 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 35.


37 Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” 246.38 Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees (London: Quartet Books, 1985), 22–23.39 Cited in John Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 106. My discussion here is indebted to Zilcosky’s wonderfully imaginative study. See also Peter F. Neumeyer, “Franz Kafka, Sugar Baron,” Modern Fiction Studies 17, no. 1 (1971): 5–16.40 Cited in Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels, 108.41 Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 26; Elizabeth Costello, 71.42 Peter Stine, “Franz Kafka and Animals,” Contemporary Literature 22, no. 1 (1981): 72.43 Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?” in Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings, ed. John Perry and Michael Bratman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 367 (emphasis in original).44 Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 76–77 (emphasis in original).45 Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), 91 (hereafter cited as D).46 Lurie’s uncharacteristically sensitive treatment of the dead dogs is certainly a crux in-terpretum. In her article, “‘Yes, I Am Giving Him Up’: Sacrificial Responsibility and Likeness with Dogs in J. M. Coetzee’s Recent Fiction,” Lucy Graham comments: “Lurie’s work in the service of dead dogs is not redemptive in itself. . . . [It] is ineffectual, even self-indulgent, as he is possibly the only one who benefits from his fussiness about the treatment of the dog corpses. His care for the dogs could be seen as his own attempt to recover redemption, or the grace that he feels he has lost.” Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 7, no. 1 (2002): 11. Sue Kossew offers an alternative view: “In ‘offering himself to the service of dead dogs,’” Kossew argues, “the ‘selfish’ David finds a kind of grace for himself and the dogs, a way of working through the endlessness of his scepticism and towards repentance, a state that David had earlier described to the tribunal as belonging to ‘another world, to another universe of discourse’” (58). Kossew, “The Politics of Shame and Redemption in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Research in African Literature 34, no. 2 (2003): 160.47 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Grace.”48 Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), 177–78.49 Michael Marais, “‘Little Enough, Less Than Little: Nothing’: Ethics, Engagement, and Change in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee,” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 1 (2000): 178 (emphasis in original).50 See Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995).51 Kafka, The Trial, trans. Idris Parry (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2000), 178.52 Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 250, 248.53 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Scapegrace.” 54 Paul Patton, “Becoming-Animal and Pure Life in Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 35, no. 1–2 (2006): 117.55 David Attwell, “Coetzee and Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Journal of South African Studies 27, no. 4 (2001): 865.56 Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 172.

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