In his acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize in 1987, J. M. Coetzee discusses the peculiar form in which the “masters of South Africa experience their unfreedom,” which is their incapacity to love—the overall inability to build an empathic, mature, and reciprocal human relationship with the Other (97). This is in essence a failure of “fraternity,” Coetzee elaborates, which the white master may yearn to have “with the people among whom he lives” but discovers that it is hard to attain, for fraternity “ineluctably comes in a package with liberty and equality” (97). Unless one acknowledges the political rights of the Other—however inadequate and limited the notions such as equality, fraternity, and liberty may be—no amount of talk about the love for the South African land with its “mountains and deserts, birds and animals and flowers” will automatically extend itself to love for the human neighbors in South Africa, for they are, after all, “what is least likely to respond to love” (97).

Over a decade later when Coetzee published Disgrace in 1999, the task of establishing fraternity with fellow human beings—what I call the human question—remained an unresolved problem, notwithstanding that South Africa has been several years into becoming a post-apartheid society that committed to “reconciliation” among the people of South Africa. Disgrace hence illuminates the difficulty of humans becoming neighbors with each other on a politically equal footing, which I will argue is exacerbated by the diversion that occurs when the main protagonist, David Lurie, develops a poignant compassion for the animals around him. In a place where “on the list of the nation’s priorities, animals come nowhere” (73), being attentive to animals is a desired sensibility, of course, but such animal ethics becomes a problem, the novel suggests, when it creates an illusion that by virtue of having compassion for animals one also naturally has compassion for the humans. The novel sheds light on how animal ethics can in fact be a cover-up for the lacking ethics between human neighbors, creating an illusion that rapport with nonhuman animals ipso facto enables rapport with human neighbors. That is, the companionship that humans establish with nonhuman animals can serve as an excuse for the lack of companionship between the humans. Of course, this is not to argue that Disgrace endorses for the prioritization of human ethics over animal ethics, but it does point to the fact that the two categories may end up competing, in the process of which one ends up marginalizing and shelving the other. Ideally, the two spheres of animal ethics and human ethics would not be mutually exclusive; but in the post-Apartheid South Africa fraught with racial antagonism and the idea of historical retribution, love for animals can delay and even deter the rise of love for human neighbors. In fact, love for animals may not even be in the best interest of humans, for it might reinforce the long-held practice of denying sympathy to the colonized while extending it generously to nonhuman animals. I thus argue that the novel engages in critiquing the limits of animal ethics, illustrating how compassion for non-human animals, although in itself an absolute ethical imperative, adumbrates or procrastinates the need to cultivate care for fellow humans.

Indeed, the most conspicuous plot in the novel is David’s transformation as he cultivates a new sensibility that is more attentive to the lives of nonhuman beings.¹ This process of ethical awakening is initiated and accompanied by a series of downfalls he experiences, such as his dismissal from professorship at Cape Technical University for the subtly forced sex he has with a student named Melanie. The situation is exacerbated when he visits his daughter Lucy on her Eastern Cape farm: not only is he gruesomely attacked by three black intruders, but Lucy is also gang-raped by them, conceiving as a result.

It is only after this deadly incident through which he experiences utter vulnerability and indignity—a degradation that nonhuman animals might experience on a regular basis—that animals and their suffering become a concern to David more explicitly. The brutal violence that nearly kills him and his daughter compels David to be more sensitive to the animals that suffer from the same kind of brutal, inexorable, and inexplicable violence. David’s change takes place subtly as he spends time with characters like Lucy and Bev Shaw whom he works with at the animal welfare center to attend the sick and euthanize stray dogs. He grows curious about how a “communion with animals” takes place (126), and sheds tears as he engages daily in the act of putting down the dogs (142-43). In a frequently noted scene, David volunteers to carry the euthanized dogs to the incinerator and put each body into its entry himself; this is to save the corpses from the indignities of being beaten “with the back of the shovel” so that they could fit the mouth of the incinerator (144). Thinking that “[h]e is not prepared to inflict such dishonour upon them” (144), he resolutely performs this funereal ritual, describing himself as becoming a “dog-man: a dog undertaker; a dog psychopomp; a harijan ” (146).

There is, then, a change in view since 1987 when Coetzee stated in the prize acceptance speech that animals are among the “least likely to respond to love.” For in Disgrace Coetzee professes a conviction in the possibility of reciprocal love between a human and an animal, as exemplified by the relationship David builds with one of the stray dogs that loves music. David is aware, for example, “of a generous affection streaming out toward him from the dog. Arbitrarily, unconditionally, he has been adopted; the dog would die for him, he knows” (215). And David reciprocates, by “dar[ing]” to introduce the limping, music-loving dog into the libretto on Byron that he has been writing for some time, allowing it to “loose its own lament to the heavens” (215).

But even with the understanding that animals reciprocate human love, sometimes in much more compelling and powerful ways than the humans, Coetzee questions the ethical and political potency of this human-animal rapport, for there is a possible collapse in the distinction between the ethics for nonhuman animals and ethics for humans, which gives the illusion that compassion for animals is somehow interchangeable with compassion for humans, when in fact the two require different kinds of commitment and principles. I do not mean to suggest that the two issues of caring for animals and humans are mutually exclusive, for they are based on the same assumption that all lives deserve respect. Indeed, one of the key questions that the novel asks is how coexistence could be envisioned among all sentient beings in the context of growing consensus that, as one character suggests, there is no realm of “higher life” allocated to humans and that it is necessary to “share some of our human privilege with the beasts” (74). But the equally important concern the novel raises is the troubled human relationships that are left hanging in the balance in the context of human attention being directed toward nonhuman animals.

Notwithstanding David’s self-redemption via newly acquired humility and ethical sensibility, therefore, the problem is that David’s “expanded sympathies…[are] complicated somewhat by a distinctive feature of a deeply embedded racism” that is “zoomorphic”—the kind that tends to project animal characteristics onto black people (Herron, 488). In addition, considering the fact that the “authorial arrangements of events” in the novel feature “blacks who perform acts of cruelty and whites who clear up the mess,” David’s narrative is “pervaded with racial anxiety and barely suppressed aggression” (489). There is then a possibility that David’s animal ethics might be grounded on racialized and racist understanding, which proves inadequate in addressing both the animal and the human question.

Some critics have thus noted on the dubiousness of David’s ethical transformation: for example, Katherine Hallemeier suggests in “Shame and Cosmopolitanism” (2013) that although the novel “shames” David by depriving him of privilege (113), because David’s determined self-renunciation also resembles “the extreme asceticism and cynicism espoused by Diogenes,” David’s supposed transformation leaves room for a doubt that “like Diogenes,” David enacts a kind of “paradoxically prideful shame” (114). Kenneth Reinhard, too, states in “ Disgrace and the Neighbor” (2009) that “Lurie’s personal path of penance as the loving Angel of Death for abandoned animals is merely personal”—in other words, David’s changed vision, in and of itself, does not “have any significance for political change in South Africa” (95). He does not mean to “scorn” David’s transformation (104), Reinhard clarifies, but to point out that despite David’s trajectory being central in the novel, he may merely be a “red herring that leads the unwary reader into the trap of identification and the illusory assumption that a change of vision is the same as a vision of change” (97). Indeed, even when David resolves to “educate the eye” because he realizes that his is “not much of an eye for anything” but “pretty girls” working on the field, he is not thinking beyond the changes that replace “pretty girls” with pregnant Lucy working like a peasant, looking the “picture of health” (218). He romanticizes the scene, as a painter might of his object, and does not see himself out on the field involved in the scenery. As Reinhard argues, he is “happy to compose a pretty picture of the future,” but it does not include himself: “For David, vision always means seeing himself seeing” (98). His vision, then, is rather for spectatorship and not participation, as yet.

It is with this understanding that the story of Petrus—the African peasant who is at once Lucy’s hired help and neighbor—must be given more attention, for throughout the novel he carries a very different sensibility towards animals. To this end I discuss what is arguably one of the significant statements in the novel, uttered by Petrus at a party he holds to celebrate his recent land transfer: “‘No more dogs. I am not any more the dog-man’” (129). In the wake of his acquisition of Lucy’s land and the securement of political autonomy, this can be read as Petrus’s declaration of emancipation, in which he ceases to be Lucy’s hired help—the “gardener and the dog-man” (64)—and becomes an upwardly mobile citizen entitled to the same rights as Lucy. The statement is also interesting if juxtaposed with David’s claims about himself becoming a dog-man, which he first states to Lucy, asking her whether she needs a “new dog-man,” since the “scandal” that will keep following him will make him unemployable, except for “obscure” jobs like “ledger clerk” or “kennel attendant” (88).

Considering that David brings up the idea of becoming a dog-man as a way of expressing humility, one can infer that it is Petrus’s aspirations to better his social status that compels him to cast out dogs in his life. Petrus’s turn away from the dogs, then, is less a sign of his speciesism than his social desire to make himself economically and politically respectable. Moreover, given the context of colonial settlements in rural areas where dogs were both physical and symbolic sentinels of the white hegemony, the response against being a dog-man is a rejection against reinforcing such practices. It also indicates Petrus’s wish to disassociate from the legacies of blacks being tied to the realm of animals and animality. It is perhaps not a coincidence that among many identities Petrus used to assume, including the dog-man, “the dig-man, the carry-man, [and] the water-man” (151), he chooses to let know of his changed status by disengaging from the dogs first.

David, too, is well aware that “dogs are bred to snarl at the mere smell of a black man” in South Africa (110), an observation that is very much in line with the history of the use of dogs as a controlling apparatus. Lucy, too, recognizes the use of dogs as a controlling tactic and its racist and colonial implications. The dogs she herself keeps in her kennel are indeed “watchdogs,” such as “Dobermanns, German Shepherds, ridge back, bull terriers, [and] Rottweilers” (61). Thus, when asked by Lurie whether she was “nervous by [her]self,” Lucy answers that “dogs still mean something. The more dogs, the more deterrence” (60). Dogs in South Africa therefore evoke a particular modern colonial history in which they were “trained or even manufactured by the state security apparatus” (xx) for disciplinary and surveillance purposes, as Van Sittert and Swart note in Canis Africanis (2008). By the 1970s, various sorts of training schools were producing “a large pool of dogs for corporate and private security” (26). The extent to which the whites relied on dogs for both physical and psychological security is also indicated by the rise in demand for the “large, fierce” dogs like Doberman Pinscher in the late 1970s, when the black anti-apartheid movement intensified (19).

The backdrop of such uses of dogs is what is indeed on David’s mind as he guesses that the murder of Lucy’s dogs by the three intruders may be an act of retaliation, “exhilarating” and “heady, like all revenge” is (110). David imagines that they might well have been saying, in the midst of their crimes: “ Call your dogs! … Go on, call your dogs! No dogs? Then let us show you dogs! ” (160). As David rightly implies, the act of killing dogs does not only suggest their intention to silence the dogs to execute their planned crime with more efficiency, but also to counter the long legacy of using dogs as a means of racial segregation and subjugation.

This listing of varied hostilities between blacks and dogs is not to suggest that their relationships are always inevitably antagonistic in South Africa: as Tim Maggs and Judith Sealy state in “Africanis” (2008), there are, unsurprisingly, signs of coexistence between humans and domesticated dogs in southern Africa since the early Iron Age, if not earlier (46). They also appear in Egyptian mural art and Saharan rock art (39) and have been collaborators in hunting and have served as high-status food in various regions of Africa (47). This all suggests that there is a long history of symbiosis and interdependence between Africans and their dogs that precedes the colonial and modern practices of instrumentalizing dogs for dominating the colonized. As the old woman and the child in Disgrace also exemplify, who respectively bring their ailing but beloved goat and dog to the clinic for examination, the human-dog relationship is not exclusively tainted by colonial apparatus (80).

Nonetheless, one cannot deny the ways in which the history of colonialism complicates further the human-dog relationship, in many cases for the worse, as numerous literary works recounting the experiences of colonization do. It is indeed a familiar experience for black people across the colonized African continent to be denied the human sympathy that is in fact generously offered to nonhuman beings. J. Nozipo Maraire’s Zenzele (2007) epistolary novel that recounts the story of then Rhodesia’s struggles for independence from the British rule, provides episodes relevant to this situation: while a black maid in a white family’s house sleeps in a separate “stinking hovel,” the master’s dog is able to enjoy “all privileges,” which, if given to the maid, would be “seen as signs of the servants being too free” (159). Zenzele also describes the “insulting” experience of having to witness the dog of a white settler sitting in the front passenger seat of the pickup truck while a black servant sits in the back in the open air (161-63). In Ama Ata Aidoo’s novella Our Sister Killjoy, the dog is not only white master’s best friend but also a colonized subject herself, who having internalized the claims of her own inferiority has become an obsequious, Europhile “dog” (1977). Thus, when the novella’s acerbic Ghanaian narrator Sissy witnesses an African woman in college in London, obviously proud to be the “only black girl on campus,” she imagines that in her immediate future the girl would be a “dog among the masters, the / Most masterly of the / Dogs” (42).

Many times, it is not only African people who are demoted through the elevation of dogs, but also dogs in Africa that are put to denigration and segregation—during the colonial period for example the native African dogs now widely referred to as the Africanis were referred to as “Kaffir” dogs and were specifically associated with Africa and Africans in the most pejorative sense.² Considered to be verminous, they were driven away to reserves and townships set up for the colored people. Doris Lessing’s autobiographical short story “The Story of Two Dogs” (1968) gives a good sense of this bigotry towards the so-called kaffir dogs in then Rhodesia. As a fourteen-year-old narrator observes, adults like her mother attempt to segregate dogs of supposedly a good breed from the native African dogs: “‘Jock needs a companion, otherwise he’ll spend his time with those dirty kaffir dogs in the compound?’” (34). The question of “‘bad blood’” is of a great concern, so that puppies born between a native dog and a “pedigree bitch” are shot down (56). Van Sittert and Swart write that in South Africa, as a consequence, the “colonial canine topography,” through the continued processes of “quarantine and extermination” in the twentieth century, showed “heavy concentrations in both the major cities and overcrowded black reserves, separated by a largely dog-depopulated white countryside” (15).³ Johan Gallant similarly observes in The Story of the African Dog (2002) the deep-rooted European prejudices against the Africanis breed, stating how the African dogs, considered as “the worst kind of disease-ridden mongrels” (1), were kept away as much as possible from crossbreeding with dogs believed to be of European origin (77-76). Gallant adds that even in the current times the stigma against the Africanis breed is “rife” in South Africa (77).⁴

Seen in this light, David’s self-identification as a dog-man and a harijan might come across as being strange to Petrus, if not preposterous and pretentious. When Petrus has two sheep tied to the stable, awaiting to be slaughtered for a party celebrating his recent transfer, David is by no means enthusiastic, perhaps not merely because it reminds him of Petrus’s gaining prosperity at the risk of Lucy losing her ground, but also because he is troubled by Petrus’s lack of thoughtfulness in treating the sheep. David is for example annoyed that the sheep are bleating all day, tethered “on a bare patch of ground,” and is thus compelled to quip to Petrus: “don’t you think we could tie them where they can graze?” (123). The sheep’s visibility reminds him of the lot of most sheep in South Africa, which is that “they exist to be used, every ounce of them” (123) and leads David to remark to Lucy, rather condescendingly: “I’m not sure I like the way he does things—bringing the slaughter-beasts home to acquaint them with the people who are going to eat them” (124). Neither does he like the fact that Petrus means to slaughter only two sheep, which seems too stingy (124). David’s frustration, then, does not entirely stem from his empathy with the tethered sheep which await their deaths; partially it comes from his distrust and dislike for his neighbor Petrus who is literally in the process of displacing her daughter to the margin.

To a certain degree, David’s reservations about Petrus is understandable: Petrus seems especially unsympathetic and even suspicious, for example, when he lets one of the men who allegedly raped Lucy attend his party, thereby frightening Lucy and enraging David. There are also aspects of Petrus that fail to convince that he is a transformative figure fit for setting the future direction of South Africa. Although David once remarks that Petrus is the “new Petrus” who work “all very swift and businesslike: all very unlike Africa” (151), and hints that there are many things to admire about him, he is not a readily likable character. He is, for example, a patriarch with sexist perceptions and shows parochialism by sticking to his own clan. As a peasant in an agricultural milieu, for instance, he wishes that one of his wives gives birth to a boy, because a “girl is very expensive” and means “[a]lways money, money, money” (130). Petrus, at least according to David’s perceptions, seems crass and insensitive towards the welfare of others, both humans and animals. The rise of Petrus then could mean, as Slavoj Zižek suggests in Less Than Nothing (2012), the “re-emergence of a gangster-like patriarchal-tribal order,” although this may itself be a consequence of apartheid that excludes the blacks from participating in “modern society” (326), rendering them incapable of operating modern institutions and systems. Petrus’s story of coming into being within the political arena, indeed, leads us to speculate on the numerous challenges South Africa might encounter on its way to a sound political restructuration.

Still yet, from Petrus’s perspective, David’s annoyance at the bleating sheep seems unfair: to ventriloquize, might Petrus not wonder why David is reluctant to offer him the same kind of consideration that he extends to the sheep? Moreover, the very radical humility and passivity that David and Lucy embrace appears to go against Petrus’s aspirations to attain and achieve more. What is the reason that David states that he is becoming a dog-man shortly after he hears Petrus’s declaration of being no longer a dog man (146)? Given the timing, it is not far-fetched to suspect that David is being deliberately antithetical, obstructing Petrus’s aspirations for success, however materialistic they may seem to David. In addition, Lucy’s assertion that “there is no higher life” for humans because “[t]his is the only life there is. Which we share with animals” (74) also contradicts Petrus’s overall inclination to disassociate from dogs and to promote himself. Of course, there is no question about the sincerity of David’s and Lucy’s ethical positions: when Lucy declares to maintain a state of self-abnegation by giving up the negotiating “cards,” “weapons,” “property,” “rights,” and “dignity” (205), David understands her, thus offering to explicate that she means to be “like a dog,” to which Lucy agrees (205). As Herron states, David fulfills Lucy’s “zero-degree checklist of survival through humiliation in dark times,” which includes a “call to become minor, indiscernible, and animal” (486).

But I want to note on the layout of the novel which has Lucy’s story of the renunciation of rights and dignity and David’s tacit agreement to it overlap with Petrus’s story of claiming them, which diminishes the significance of all that Petrus struggles to attain and achieve. David’s articulation of himself as a dog-man, too, has the effect of making Petrus’s detachment from dogs look somewhat anachronistic and speciesist. Especially with David’s tendency to offer pedantic observations, he moves himself, unknowingly, to a higher moral ground, from where he insinuates that human ontology cannot be separated from animals and their mortal vulnerability. It seems important to speculate on the political ramifications of David’s and Lucy’s announcement that they are dog-men or are “like a dog.” Despite David’s sincere intentions and Lucy’s radical expiation, their commitment and humbleness outside the usual parameters of jurisdiction and political language has the effect of removing the already fading confidence in South Africa as a well-functioning, reliable polity. In other words, by suggesting that for whites in South Africa, the only viable way to be is to be “like a dog,” they deny the political potency of South Africa as a nation. In this David and Lucy do not differ too much from another neighbor Ettinger, who tells that he “never go[es] anywhere without [his] Beretta” because the police are not going to save you, not any more” (100). Thus, in post-apartheid South Africa, and especially in the rural area, whites either carry guns because “the best is, you save yourself” (100), or one becomes an animal, retreating from the realm of human politics.

This finally brings us to the problem of becoming a neighbor and establishing fraternity, for a resolution to become like a dog, while expiatory, humble, and sacrificial, does not seem to magically open ways for humans to become fraternal or be neighbors to each other. Ettinger, for example, says of Petrus and his kind: “Not one of them you can trust” (109). David, too, “spies Petrus out at the dam,” thinking it “odd” that Petrus has been away when the intrusion and rape occurred (114). At any rate, it is quite clear in the novel that the kind of commiserating, heartfelt, and reciprocal communion David establishes with dogs fails to materialize in his relationship with fellow humans. Indeed, an ethical relationship with fellow humans—one that is empathic, reciprocal, and mutually respectful—is something that David struggles to establish throughout the novel, wondering at times whether he even wishes for it. David feels “elemental rage,” for example, when he catches one of the men who allegedly raped Lucy peeping at her through the bathroom window. Shouting “You filthy swine!,” David admits that the anger he experiences is the kind that he has never had before and thinks that the “phrases that all his life he has avoided seem suddenly just and right: Teach him a lesson, Show him his place. So this is what it is like, he thinks! This is what it is like to be a savage!” (206). Also, when David testily asks Petrus about the three intruders and their crime, trying to force Petrus to at least acknowledge that the incident is a violation that warrants legal punishment, he is enraged at Petrus’s seeming pretention of ignorance. Although David tries to maintain his temper, checking to “admonish” himself, the truth is that “he would like to take Petrus by the throat” (119).

Of course, the rage David feels for both the boy and Petrus is understandable, given the boy’s alleged involvement and Petrus’s alleged complicity to the crime involving his daughter. Yet, the anger is also intensified by the fact that Petrus can talk back at David and taunt him in ways dogs or other animals do not. Petrus, for example, with calm and prudence that maddens David, tells him that David is “not wrong” to want legal justice (119). The peeping boy also piques David, by shouting “We will kill you all!”— “you” here referring to David and Lucy, and possibly Katy the dog (207). As the plural pronoun “we” uttered by the boy suggests, there is the dichotomous logic of “us” and “them” that the boy mobilizes, through which he further creates a sense of threat. To the boy there is no ambiguity regarding whose side he is on and whom he affiliates himself with: it is clearly him and his people against white people like David, Lucy, and Ettinger. In a different passage, Petrus, too, deploys the similar logic by defending the boy, telling the accusing David that “‘he is a child. He is my family, my people’” (201). To this “naked” answer, David thinks to himself, “Well, Lucy is his people ” (201), thus echoing Petrus and the boy.

It is true that David’s equally clannish, antagonizing response is thrown in the heat of the moment: elsewhere when in a poised state, he more open-mindedly reflects on how the end of the apartheid is changing the nature of social relationships between blacks and whites, thinking that “[t]he word that seems to serve best” to describe Petrus is “ neighbour ”—that is, a neighbor who “at present happens to sell his labour” to Lucy (116-17). As Rita Barnard writes in “Coetzee’s Country Ways” (2002), David’s “word choice is potentially a good one: derived from the Old English ‘ neah ’ (‘near’) and ‘ bur ’ (‘dwell or farm’), the word … constitutes a recognition of the black peasant as … a fellow farmer and dweller to whom one is bound by traditions of equality, reciprocity, and hospitality” (385). That David brings himself to regard Petrus as a neighbor, and “is even prepared, however guardedly, to like him” is indeed promising (117). David is serious in his attempt to understand Petrus, despite that he has the tendency to position himself as an ethnographer or a non-involved observer: he thinks, for example, that “[h]e would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day” in words “preferably not reduced to English” (117).

David’s feelings for Petrus as a neighbor is still complex, combined with the humane wish to be tolerant of Petrus on the one hand and feeling vaguely threatened on the other hand. Although he admires Petrus’s showing of “patience, energy, [and] resilience,” he also thinks that Petrus is a “peasant, a paysan, a man of the country. A plotter and a schemer and no doubt a liar too, like peasants everywhere” (117). He at once knows that “Petrus has a vision of the future in which people like Lucy have no place,” but this awareness is followed by his understanding that he need “not make an enemy of Petrus,” because after all, “country life has always been a matter of neighbours scheming against each other, wishing on each other pests, poor crops, financial ruin” (118). He also thinks that “were this a chess game, he would say that Lucy has been outplayed on all fronts” (151), thus viewing living among neighbors as akin to playing a zero-sum game. Yet, in a torn state of mind, David is also aware that “in a crisis,” neighbors are “ready to lend a hand” (118). During his attendance at Petrus’s party, David also thinks, although for a fleeting moment, that “Petrus and his wife are…making him feel at home” and that they are “[k]ind people” (131). Unlike his feelings toward animals, the feelings toward human neighbors are more complicated in that they alternate between a relationship that is based on cooperation and competition, and between suspicion and something like understanding.

As Reinhard notes, this relationship is “fundamentally contingent” because the parties involved do not encounter each other with obligations to the law that dictates the terms of neighbor relations (103). Human ethics under the new post-apartheid democracy is something new—it is a “new world they live in,” David thinks, which “Petrus knows…and he knows...and Petrus knows that he knows” (117). Under such circumstances, the step toward establishing proper neighbor relation is to accept that it entails radical contingency that might even bring violence, in that neighbors are unfree from the feelings of animosity in post-apartheid South Africa (101). Disgrace then is a work that illuminates on how the relationship of neighbors in all the senses of the term—including being commonsensical, hospitable, and law-abiding—are hard to come by, for one can only fully be such a neighbor to the other when there is an understanding of shared fraternity and of contingencies that inevitably follow any human relationships that are equal and democratic.

If is for these reasons that the fact that Lucy is claiming that she is disowning the ideals of dignity, liberty, and rights so as to start with nothing, like a dog, delays further the development of neighbor relations and fraternity rather than expedite it. Rather than meet Petrus in a political arena, Lucy chooses to step away from it and precludes the chance for political recognition and negotiation. The alliance that Petrus proposes that he and Lucy form through marriage is also troubling and far from what ideal coexistence among neighbors should be like—it may be a practical choice in that Petrus gets to own Lucy’s farm in return of providing Lucy a protection, but her unwillingness, not to mention her preference for women, makes this a forced pact. Disgrace thus suggests that the empathic relationships with human neighbors are slower to emerge than with the animals that live nearby precisely because it entails risks of change of hearts and antagonism that stems from conflicts of interest. More are put at risk when one gets involved with human neighbors than with animals.

The only times when David’s mistrust of and reservations about the human Other are removed are when David has sex, as he does with Soroya, Melanie, and Bev, as well as with the” German girl” long time ago (192), and with a “tall girl in a minute black leather skirt” (194). In fact, for David, the idea becoming a neighbor and establishing fraternity among the humankind, a process that necessitates an open-mind and the readiness to bear contingences that Reinhard speaks of, does not sit well with him; when Lucy accosts him as he might be a mere visitor, David welcomes this new status, which although is a sign of a “new footing [and] a new start,” further removes him from the immediate ethical imperatives to go through the trouble of developing human relationships (218).

As a matter of fact, David is grossly mistaken to believe that if there is “force that drives the utmost strangers into each other’s arms, making them kin, kind, beyond all prudence,” it is sex with women of different race and origin (194). When Melanie’s boyfriend tells David to “[s]tay with your own kind,” David thinks that it is an impossible request, one coming from a lack of understanding of the strong “drive” that draws strangers to each other’s arms, ending up creating kinship (194). As true as this might be, the new, post-apartheid South Africa that Coetzee envisions is one that is not based on the creation of kinship through fortuitous encounters in which the “seed of generation…driv[e] deep into the woman’s body” (194), but one based on civic recognition of the other as one’s neighbor with equal political status sharing the values of fraternity. Through women David mistakenly thinks he is fraternizing, creating a false kind of transracial and cosmopolitan relationship. That Lucy is driven to a situation where she establishes kinship with the different race, horrifyingly through rape and unwanted marriage, proves that it cannot be a way to fraternize and to establish humane relationship.

Confronted with the daunting task of becoming a neighbor and establishing fraternity among the neighbors that does not entail sexual attraction and erotic impulses, David’s attention is turned to righting his relationship with animals, which although crucial, is something private, and even a compromised action in the light of human, political context. In the very last scene of the novel where David decides to euthanize his beloved, limping dog, he makes a gesture of radical self-humiliation and renunciation that is akin to Lucy’s determination to let go of her human, white privileges. This courageous decision to take a full responsibility of the dog, denying himself gratification that comes from keeping the dog by his side, entails an ambiguity despite its dignified aspect, in that he has the dog in his arms “like a lamb” (220) being carried to an altar, which at once makes him a sacrificial but also priestly figure who propitiates meantime, in contrast to what might be even called as David’s spiritual communion with animals in this passage, his relationships to humans retain the status quo, alluding in fact to more challenges and troubles that lie ahead. To recall the words of Coetzee’s Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech again, no amount of love expressed for the South African landscape and the animals that populate it can actually replace love not yet expressed for the fellow humans. Love for animals is not by necessity a passage to love for humans—there is more to be worked on in the world of Disgrace therefore, which not even the most tender feelings for nonhuman animals might necessarily make that work easier. In that sense Disgrace is a painfully self-interrogative novel that scrutinizes its heartfelt yet inadequate attention to and compassion for animals.