Age of bronze, state of grace: Music and dogs in Coetzee's Disgrace

19 Lurie recalls the Church Fathers' conclusion that the souls of animals "are tied to their bodies and die with them" (78; see also 161), but by the end of the book he is moved to depict the canine soul with visual and olfactory vividness; and he insists-against his daughter's commonsense skepticism-that "We are all souls. We are souls before we are born" (79). When he dreams that Lucy is calling to him to save her, he speculates that her soul might have left her body and come to him (104). Mrs. Curren also frequently uses the word: see, in particular, her description of the children with stunted souls (7), her description of the imagined effect of her letter on her daughter (129-30), her depiction of Vercueil and his dog by her side, waiting "for the soul to emerge ... neophyte, wet, blind, ignorant" (186).

20 It is interesting to note that Elizabeth Costello uses the former type of other to reinforce her point about the latter. Reminding her audience that she is the author of a novel called The House on Eccles Street, in which Joyce's Molly Bloom is the main character, she says, "If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster" (The Lives of Animals 35). 1 suspect I'm not alone in finding the logic here specious, but the strength of Costello's performance does not depend, for reasons she is very explicit about, on her reasoning (see note 26 below). Coetzee's willingness to associate aesthetic creation with other-directed acts in the world might be seen as a challenge to the view-perhaps most powerfully expressed by Thomas Mann in Death in Venice and Doctor Faustus-that the former tends inevitably toward amorality.

21 See Attridge, "Expecting the Unexpected," for further discussion.

22 See Derrida, Aporias 33-35.

23 For a full and revealing study of this topic, see Clark.

2I 1 have explored this aspect of artistic creation in "Innovation, Literature, Ethics," an essay that appeared before the novel but that otherwise might have borne as an epigraph a sentence from this section of it: "He is inventing the music (or the music is inventing him)" (186).

25 Other works by Derrida that discuss the animal/human boundary include Of Spirit (47-57), ... Eating Well"'" (111-17), and "Force of Law" (18-19), as well as Aporias (see note 27 below).

26 Elizabeth Costello-who is, significantly, a novelist-also feels that all rational arguments about the treatment of animals are, finally, beside the point. She urges her audience to read the poets, "and if the poets do not move you, I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner" (The Lives of Animals 65).

27 Animal death is one of the subjects treated by Derrida in Aporias. In this work, Derrida troubles the distinction Heidegger tries to draw between human dying (sterben) and animal dying (verenden) (30-42).

As Derrida points out in "L'animal que done je suis," animals are outside both shame and shamelessness: "aussi etranger A la pudeur qu'a l'impudeur" (255).