Contemplating Finitude: Animals in The Book of the Duchess

Abstract

“When people bring a dog in they do not say straight out, ‘I have brought you this dog to kill,’ but that is what is expected: that they will dispose of it, make it disappear, dispatch it to oblivion.”¹ So begins David Lurie’s journey toward his exploration of responsibility toward the dead dogs of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. Lurie, working at a veterinary clinic, is disgusted with the workers’ treatment of the euthanized dogs who need to be incinerated. He takes over the job, but he wonders why this compulsion to act; is it “for his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing”?² He dismisses this, as well, reducing his responsibility to “there is no one else stupid enough to do it.”³ Lurie’s sense of responsibility to the dead animals, however, is telling in that he feels he must be present to their death. He individualizes their deaths (he puts them in the incinerator “one-by-one”). Although Lurie dismisses his newfound responsibility as wrongheaded, his need to be there at the dogs’ death and incineration calls us to question how the human and the animal are connected and how to account for the “oblivion.”

So it would be necessary to learn spirits. Even and especially if this, the spectral, is not.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 14.