Amphil today

I feel an uncharacteristic melancholy today. I am listening to Mary Chapin Carpenter, whose music brings the soft sad longing for small American cities with half restored downtowns, places I will never live and that I miss nonetheless.

Philosophy and the Figurative

Introduction:

The opening of the Phaedo is as complicated as that in any of Plato’s dialogues, including Symposium. Symposium’s opening has been carefully analyzed , but even though at least five book-length treatments of Phaedo have been published during the past 20 years , no thoroughgoing analysis of the opening was part of any of these works. I believe that the opening offers fascinating, even indispensable information about how to read the dialogue and also tells us important things about what Plato thought about the activity of philosophy and the subject of the dialogue, dying and the fate of the soul.
What I choose to call the “Prologue” (57a -61c) has at least three sections: the journey motifs (57a –b); the opposing theories about the relationship between pleasure and pain (58e–59b; 60b–60c); Socrates’ self-description (60d-61b). This paper concentrates on the first part. There are three (or four) of what I call “journey motifs”: Phaedo’s journey from Athens to Elis, which combines themes of homecoming and liberation; the “accidental” journey of the theoroi from Athens to Delos in Theseus’ ship to honor Apollo; Theseus’ trip from Athens to Crete and then into the Labyrinth to slay the monster Minotaur. My claim is that each of these journey motifs foreshadows key themes in the dialogue -- the fate of the soul and the nature of philosophy – and offers the reader/listener figurative templates for thinking about various aspects of both philosophy and dying. All three motifs suggest that both philosophy and dying are kinds of journeys, or are like journeys. The three templates suggest, in turn, that dying and philosophy are forms of homecoming and liberation, that they can be forms of pilgrimage that offer prayer and thanksgiving, and that they are journeys to the underworld to do battles against “monsters.” The affining of both dying and philosophy with the thematic of the journey is also an implicit rejection of the skeptical position that neither philosophy nor dying take one anywhere, that they are not journeys at all, or in any way. The multiplicity of journey templates, and the fact that all three are figures that dying and philosophy are like, and with none of which either is identical, suggest further that even though the piece clearly wants to suggest that both dying and philosophy go somewhere worthwhile, Plato understands perfectly, as Rosen among others have suggested, that humans can have no dependable knowledge about what happens to us after death. The best we humans can produce are likely stories about the fate of the soul and the value of philosophy, and the three journey motifs affirm this limitation, and begin the series of likely stories of which this dialogue is composed.

The First Journey Motif: Phaedo Heads Home

Phaedo is a dialogue that begins on the run, on the road about halfway between Athens and Phaedo’s native Elis, a city on the west coast of the Peloponnese. It also begins not only in the middle of a journey but also in media res, with a peremptory question and a reflexive pronoun: “Autos!” Inflected Greek allows this pre-positioning of the pronoun. It has the effect of stopping Phaedo’s journey by calling out to him, by challenging him: “You! – Phaedo – were you yourself present when Socrates drank that poison in the jail?” The peremptory, challenging interrogator is one Echecrates, a Pythagorean who might have migrated from Italy, and who was said to have been a student of Greece’s greatest Pythagorean, Philolaus.
We find ourselves on the road – somewhere – in an immediate, tenseless narrative present. We know from the question that Socrates must already be dead. We know who Phaedo is (because we know, or can now know, that we must be savvy Athenians who would know such a thing) – that devoted follower of Socrates. And we also know, or can be presumed to know, that Echecrates is who we just said he was. We soon learn that we are in the little city/town of Phlius. Echecrates makes clear that “no one ever goes to Athens from here anymore, and no Athenians have visited for a long time.” (Phaedo, 57a-b).
Echecrates’ peremptory question aside – we will return to it in a moment – another question hangs in the metaphoric air. What in the world are we (by “we” I mean the putative audience, both for the Phaedo-Echecrates interchange, and for the dialogue, and/or for both) doing in Phlius? Plato rarely sets his works in far-away places. The only dialogue that happens further away from Athens than Phaedo is the Laws, and Socrates is absent from this work, as are his Athenian “cronies”. Phaedo is unique in taking Socrates (or, to be more accurate, some version of Socrates) out of his home area. Theaetetus carries Socrates, in written form, to the nearby city of Megara, and Phaedrus takes him outside the city walls under the plane tree. But only in Phaedo does some iteration of Socrates venture far from Athens, farther than he ever ventured in life.
So here we are, far from Athens, and clearly far outside Athens’ sphere of influence, in a city that has no important connections with Athens, and almost no human connection with it. This setting cannot be accidental , even though Phaedo’s presence there seems like an accident. He just happens to be stopping on his way home, in one of those towns that any traveler finds on a long trip, a wide place in the road that comes along just as night is falling. Phaedo is not in Phlius to do anything. His “visit” is not really a visit at all but a stopover. We can imagine Echecrates, whose questions indicate a serious interest in Socrates and philosophy, hearing that a traveler from Athens, said to be a known close associate of Socrates, is passing through town. We can imagine Echecrates seeking Phaedo out and introducing himself. Perhaps they had mutual philosophical friends (no such person is mentioned), but they had, at any rate, a shared interest in Socrates. And we can imagine Echecrates prevailing on Phaedo to tell what he knows about the death of Socrates.
All this is plausible – but consider. The dialogue whose subject is the all-important story of what Socrates said and did during the final hours of his earthly life only happens at all because Phaedo, with other things on his mind, happens to meet up with a curious and half-informed Pythagorean in the out of the way town of Phlius. And we, whoever we are, happen, mirabile dictu, to be along for the ride! If Phaedo had arrived in Phlius earlier in the day might he have pressed on to the next town and missed Echecrates entirely? Would there have been another Echecrates in that town? What if Phaedo had decided to take a ship along the Gulf of Corinth and then out into the Ionian Sea, so that he never made landfall and never had such a conversation? What if he had met with an accident along the road and never gotten to Phlius? What if Echecrates had been out of town when Phaedo came through, or was rushed and had no time to talk? These and any number of other possible scenarios would have cancelled this fortuitous meeting, and if it had never happened would the story ever have been told? There is no way for us to tell because so far as we know that narrative, the one in which the story of Socrates’ death never gets told, or gets told differently, or by another person, does not exist. We have only this narrative in which, amidst the implicit anxiety provoked by the idea that this event need never have taken place, it does take place.
The first level of sense in Phaedo’s journey home is that journeys are inherently contingent. They need never happen, and nothing in the deep order of the world makes them happen. Once they are initiated, chance proliferates. They can go this way or that way, quickly or slowly, on track or off. Journeys are a continual temptation to divagation and happenstance. Is Plato suggesting something here about philosophy, and about dying? Is he perhaps beginning to hint that philosophy itself is an optional activity, that it might or might not be practiced, and as important, that it might or might not be remembered and preserved? Philosophy could just stop being, perhaps, if a certain man took the wrong turn on a certain day.
It might also be the same with dying. Dying as separation of soul from body seems to be just something that befalls us and over which we have no ultimate control. But if dying is conceived as a kind of journey, as a planned path one takes from one locale – this life – to another – that life – then this sort of dying, over which we do seem to be able to exercise some control (especially if we are philosophers), might, like any journey, and like philosophy itself, either happen or not.
Under this description Phaedo’s “accidental” appearance in Phlius and his “accidental” meeting with Echecrates take on a different coloring. Perhaps they might not have happened but in this narrative, which Plato creates and entirely controls, the appearance and the meeting will happen. Of course, Plato might not have written Phaedo, but this “chance” is always already obviated when we pick up a copy and begin reading. Plato did write the thing and because he wrote it Phaedo will always show up in Phlius and Echecrates will always be there to meet him. However accidental the meeting seems, its contingency is a function of the narrative, and is raised there so that we will feel some anxiety and raise the sorts of questions I just raised – if we are very careful readers.
But why Phlius? This question has not yet been answered. Aside from questions of accident and contingency there is the more pointed question of location. Could it be that Plato is sending philosophy-as-story on the road because its putative home city, Athens, is no longer fit to be its site? Could there be a trenchant political commentary here to add to the philosophical reminder about the contingency of the enterprise? Doesn’t any old town, even an obscure Phlius, “deserve” to be the site of an all-important telling of an all-important dialogue because in killing Socrates Athens orphaned philosophy, abandoned it, and in that sense set it free to wander the roads of Greece looking for a home? Is philosophy being asked to survive hand-to-mouth as a wanderer, like Eros in Symposium? And is Phlius then Anytown? Has philosophy been oddly universalized in being rejected by Athens? Is its “exile”, or voluntary departure, both a judgment on the city and an opportunity for philosophy to flourish in more salubrious climates? If, finally, philosophy might or might not have survived, it is clear that the only place it could survive was in Phlius, for which read, non-Athens.
These two ruminations on place and this dialogue also remind us that the readers/listeners are Athenians, who are still either practicing philosophy or hearing about it, in Athens, and who therefore know that philosophy still resides there in some way. Thus the exile/departure of philosophy from Athens has both happened, narratively, and not happened, because in the narrative philosophy returns to Athens in the sense that the story of its non-Athenian exile is being told in Athens, and in the second sense that the setting of the last dialogue is in Athens even if the tale itself is being told in Phlius. At the same time, this narrative Athens, the Athens of Socrates’ jail cell, has also been displaced to Phlius, so that in the end the anxiety about contingency is reborn as an anxiety about where philosophy really is, and where it belongs.
Finally, some of the listeners/readers could well be individuals who had been there in the jail on that day with Phaedo and Socrates, and whom Plato had not chosen as the one to tell this crucial tale, though he could have chosen any of the fourteen named people present. It would appear that Athens’ culpability for killing Socrates and thereby “killing” or banishing philosophy, or, alternately, for allowing it to leave (for Elis?) extended to Athenians and their near-neighbors even if those Athenians had been loyal devotees of Socrates. Apparently no one too closely affiliated with the guilty city could tell Socrates’ tale, and could certainly not tell it in Athens, which brings us to an examination of the person whom Plato did choose to tell the tale – Phaedo.
Phaedo’s displacement of philosophy from Athens and the subsequent unsettling of the question of where it is now to be found raises issues about who Phaedo might be, as well. First, we are on the road with Phaedo at all because Phaedo is not an Athenian (and how telling that Plato chose the single non-Athenian, non-close neighbor, to tell the tale!) and he has no reason to stay in Athens, because he has no reason to love Athens.
Classical sources tell us that Phaedo was born to a noble family Elis. He was taken prisoner in an obscure war that involved Athens and Elis but that was not part of the larger Peloponnesian War then raging throughout Greece. Phaedo was taken to Athens as a captive/slave and “employed” as a male prostitute, a catamite, in an Athens brothel. The story is that he heard Socrates conversing in the Athenian agora or on the street and was captured by what he heard. He began to sneak away from the brothel to become part of Socrates’ circle. Socrates was said to have noticed him and, having learned of his situation, prevailed on Crito or Alcibiades to persuade their wealthy friends to purchase Phaedo’s freedom, which was done.
After his freedom was purchased Phaedo devoted himself full-time to learning how to become a philosopher. While he lived Socrates represented freedom to Phaedo in a double sense. First in a more literal sense he owed Socrates his physical freedom. In a more figurative but powerful sense Phaedo also owed his freedom from the unwanted desires of his clients, and his own freedom from his body, to the purification that philosophy offered.
But when Athens killed his mentor Phaedo had two reasons to hate the city: it had made him a slave and it had killed his master and guide. He was neither citizen nor metic, and so when Socrates died Phaedo left. The remaining circle of philosophers left behind, of whom Plato was one, were clearly not enough to keep Phaedo in the city.
Something interesting happened. When Phaedo left the city he took someone with him. Plato imposes a heavy narrative/dramatic burden on this homeward bound ex-slave. As a prostitute he took on bodies against his will. Now, willingly, he bears another body, that of the dead Socrates, not in the form of his corpse but in the shape of his story, which Phaedo carries along with him on his journey home. Socrates is dead. His corpse, we can be sure, is buried in Athens, perhaps in the Kerameikos district on the road leading into the city. But the speaking Socrates, Socrates-as-soul, the essential Socrates, has disappeared. Perhaps his psyche has already migrated to the next world to be with the gods. Socrates cannot be found in the city that he refused to leave. But here, in Phlius, in the person of Phaedo, in Phaedo, Socrates can still be found in the world in the “person” of a nearly perfectly remembered conversation. In this remembered (re-assembled) conversation the essential, speaking Socrates can be resurrected into a timeless narrative present. Whenever Phaedo chooses to open his mouth, the missing Socrates comes back to life.
It is appropriate that Phaedo should carry Socrates, and by extension philosophy, and by further extension the death for which philosophy is said to prepare one, inside himself. Phaedo is a philosopher in training who knows enough about the activity to be able to remember what was philosophically significant in Socrates’ conversation about dying. But he is better able to carry Socrates around inside himself because, unlike his aristocratic rivals for the function, Phaedo has suffered exclusion, humiliation, imprisonment and a kind of death (being torn from his native surroundings). Even in the Socratic circle Phaedo was an inveterate outsider – a foreigner, from a faraway city, with the dubitable “pedigree” of having been what is now called a “sex worker” and a slave. He knows what it means to be marginalized, and this set of experiences affine him with a Socrates who, despite being a native Athenian and entirely loyal to his city, ended his life as a shackled convict, rejected by the laws of the city he loved so well. Phaedo the alien unfortunate is in a better existential position to preserve his master’s message than anyone else – even, ironically, the Plato who gives Phaedo the privilege of bearing this precious tale, and this precious memory. We belong in Phlius with Phaedo because Phaedo is Socrates’ most apt witness.
But not only is Phaedo the best witness because he is an outsider who has suffered unjustly. Phaedo is also the one whose departure speaks of liberation, and of something new and exciting that is happening to philosophy. As Phaedo leaves, shaking off Athenian oppression, he shatters the putative Athenian hegemony over philosophy. It is no longer an Athenian monopoly but can be made portable, and revealed to any Greek who cares enough to listen and participate, be that individual a Phliasian or an Elian. With Phaedo philosophy goes on the road, becomes broadcast, leaves the confines of that fatal jail. And with Phaedo goes Socrates. The dead Athenian master, too, goes on the road – and that is the only place where you can “see” him.
This liberating homeward journey in which Phaedo carries “Socrates” (his psyche?) around inside him as an invisible gift aligns Phaedo even more deeply with Socrates. Just as, in Symposium (215b), Alcibiades compared Socrates to a statue of Selenos that, when broken open, fell away to reveal that it hid images of the gods, so, too, is Phaedo now like Socrates/Selenos in the fact that, when he is “broken open” by Echecrates’ peremptory question, he too reveals inside himself the hidden images of the divine Socrates and his godly secret, philosophy. Phaedo has become the Socrates who is like Selenos, but the “gods” Phaedo hides are Socrates himself and his philosophical activity. Extending the likeness we can also affine Phaedo with the satyr Marsyas, cited in the same passage in Symposium. If Socrates is like Marsyas in Symposium, (216a) he is even more closely allied with music and enchantment in Phaedo (61e, 77e, 84d – 85b, 114d). In Phaedo Socrates soothes the childish fears of death, represented by the female vampire figure of Mormolykeia (also known as Lamia) by “singing” consoling if less-than-perfect arguments about the soul’s immortality. Phaedo, in replicating these same consoling arguments in Socrates’ voice, also becomes Marysas, “singing” his master’s song and enchanting audiences all over Greece.
We can maintain a connection with Symposium by suggesting, further, that Phaedo’s trip away from Athens, carrying Socrates as a hidden god and a song, is also readable as Phaedo carrying the “verbal child” that Diotima identified as the proper issue of a philosophical union/marriage. (209 b-e) Phaedo is “pregnant” with the story of Socrates’ death: ironically, he can keep giving birth to the death narrative and to the dead Socrates, who is now not only an image of the gods but a kind of philosophical newborn.
A final way to characterize Phaedo and the “things he carries” is that he is also like a living sarcophagus, or “flesh-eater”. He has “eaten” (taken in, remembered) or introjected the all-important final conversation about death, and when his “lid” (his mouth?) is opened by the right questions he disgorges, or less colorfully, he reveals, the Socratic “remains”, the last conversation that has now become the lasting substitute for Socrates’ body and has in effect become that body.
The outcast ex-slave is freeing himself from his Athenian imprisonment and taking with him, also away from its Athenian imprisonment, the “body” of Socrates, the tale of his death and transfiguration, which has also now been liberated from its “body”, the Athenian prison, and which has now perhaps become not Socrates’ body but an earthly version of his soul. This body – the body of the remembered discourse – now become a “soul” – the invisible essence of the conversation – is also, like Phaedo, going “home”. Its “home” is now wherever Phaedo is asked the right question. Socrates’ last conversation, and philosophy, which it embodies, has become a “moveable feast”, free from Athenian constraints and at home anywhere and everywhere men have ears, and Phaedo has the leisure to speak.
This reflection brings us to the last thing we need to say about the first journey motif. How did this tale told on the road (we have no idea how many times, or in how many places, by the way) far from Athens and in a town (or towns) Athenians never visit, and from which no visitors come to Athens, make its own journey of “homecoming” back to the Athens from which it had been expelled, and from which it had fled? As far as we know Phaedo went to Elis, became a philosopher, wrote dialogues (mimicking Plato rather than Socrates!) and never returned to Athens. There is nothing in the set-up of the dialogue to indicate that he was the source of the conversation replicated in the piece. Nor do we hear that some philosophically adept and interested Phliasian came up to Athens and repeated this story. In any event, why would a Phliasian bother to carry such coals to an ancient Newcastle? Socrates died in Athens with plenty of witnesses and the last thing these witnesses needed was a second-hand rehearsal of events with which they were already familiar. Traveling to Athens to tell Athenians what had happened there makes no sense.
At the same time there is also no record of an Athenian accompanying Phaedo just as far as Phlius and then turning around and going back to Athens to retell the tale. We certainly have no indication that Plato himself ever traveled to such an unlikely place. And again, there would be plenty of Athenians who could tell the tale just as fully, and so Phaedo’s version of it would not be required.
All these considerations make clear that there were no Athenian witnesses to the event (our “presence” then, as auditors of Phaedo’s performance, becomes entirely mysterious) and no reason for a Phliasian to bear the tale back to Athens. We know that Phaedo never returned. Then, how did we get this tale that begins in media res? The “secret” is that this tale could never have made the journey from Phlius to Athens. There is no doubt that Phaedo left Athens and went home. We have no idea what he did or did not do on the way. But such considerations are irrelevant. What matters is that we have this “report”, this “retelling”, which is clearly a useful fiction. This tale of Phaedo’s wonderful journey home, the tale of his retelling of his tale, the marvelous resurrection of Socrates on the road – it is all just that, a tale, a mythos, a likely story, perhaps an Aesopian fable or cautionary tale.
What does this final caveat make clear? It makes clear that the set-up, the characters, the site, the entire frame are a product of art and not of nature. If there were ever a clearer demonstration of the operation of the principle of “logographic necessity”, that Socrates attributes to well-made writing in Phaedrus this is it. Since this event – Phaedo’s performance of Socrates’ final conversation – could not be have happened or, if it had, could not have been known as directly as the form of the piece implies, we have perfect knowledge that this work is perfectly crafted in the most plausible possible way. The dialogue never did make its journey back to Athens because Plato crafted it entirely in Athens, and putting it on the road must then be a fully self-conscious strategy that gives us warrant for just the sort of overdetermined hermeneutic frenzy that I have just elaborated on it.
There is something else, something more still, to say about this first journey motif. If this is a carefully crafted tale, essentially a piece of fiction designed to tell us the meaning of Socrates’ death, and the significance of both death and philosophy, then why not just get on with the job? Is it economical, aesthetically or philosophically, to delay the conversation itself, and to interpose these motifs, which establish allusive connections between doing philosophy, and dying, and taking journeys? If my read is reasonable at all what Plato is telling us very early in the piece is that doing philosophy, or dying, is like going on a journey home, like being liberated, and that Phaedo is like Socrates, who is like Selenos and Marsyas, just as this reproduced conversation is like an immediate report of something we are directly witnessing. Nothing in this Prologue is anything; there are only likenesses and no identities.
Perhaps we are being introduced to an idea about philosophy: perhaps it can only tell of likenesses, not of identities, even though its longing is to speak of identities. Perhaps it has to keep deferring its explanations along a line a likenesses that is forever receding, because in the face of the question of the soul’s fate philosophy cannot become “metaphysics of presence” . We are being reminded by these motifs and deferrals that philosophy – and Socrates – are both always on a journey homeward, a journey to name Being, but a journey that, at least in this world, always asymptotically approaches home, and perfect liberation, without ever getting there.

The Second Journey Motif: The Voyage to Delos
The second journey that interposes between the reader/listener and the performance of Socrates’ final conversation is the one that “accidentally” deferred Socrates’ execution and therefore made the long final conversation possible. If Phaedo’s journey home was the occasion for the unveiling of the tale, the voyage to Delos is the journey that gave Phaedo a tale to carry home. When Echecrates asks why the execution was delayed so long, Phaedo tells him that it “just happened” (Phaedo, xx-yy) that the priests crowned the prow of Theseus’ ship with a wreath the day before Socrates’ trial. Phaedo explains what this means because this festival might not have been known to a non-Athenian like Echecrates even though the event that it commemorates, Theseus’ slaying of the Minotaur, would be well known.
The festival commemorates the assistance that Apollo was said to have given Theseus when he went to Crete to battle the Minotaur. During the time that the ship was en route to Delos, Apollo’s birthplace and the most important religious site in Greece, and on its way home, the city could not pollute itself with executions. Delos lies in the Cycladic island group southeast of Athens. Adverse winds and rough seas could lengthen such a voyage considerably, and Socrates was given the “gift” of this extra time to interpret his dreams, and to versify a hymn to Apollo and some of Aesop’s fables. (Phaedo 61b) It also gave him the “leisure” to lead a lengthy final conversation unpressured by anyone more powerful than his jailer.
The first thing that strikes one, before we address the substance of the journey, is the note of chance that reminds one of the apparent contingency of Phaedo’s performance of the body of the dialogue. Now we hear, explicitly, that the temporal respite that made the dialogue possible at all was also a function of sheer coincidence, thereby redoubling the anxiety: not only might Phaedo never have told his tale, but there might never have been a tale to tell, barring the happy accident that led to the co-incidence of the festival and the trial. The dialogue is doubly contingent.
If we revert to our earlier remarks about logographic necessity the situation becomes more complex and more interesting. On one level there is no question but that there really was such an Apollo festival and that it really did happen just before Socrates’ trial. But in a piece so carefully crafted as this, the fact that Phaedo opens his remarks on this festival with the phrase “It just happened” did not just happen. Plato made that happen, and he introduced, or privileged, this coincidence so he could make something out of it.
What does he make of it? The first thing to note is that there seems nothing chancy, in a religious or spiritual sense, about the coincidence. The festival honors Apollo and Apollo had always been Socrates’ special patron. Apollo gave Socrates’ his philosophical mission – or at least the elenchic elements of it – when the Delphic Oracle, which operated under his direct protection, under his temple at Delphi, announced that Socrates’ was the world’s wisest man. (Apology, 21a) Socrates’ career as a philosopher was thus sanctioned and launched by Apollo’s oracle, the very same Apollo whose hymn we find Socrates reworking in the Phaedo. It is fitting that his temporary reprieve from death, at the very end of his philosophical career, be made possible by the god whose pronouncements began that career. Apollo, it appears, is protecting his philosopher one last time.
But this festival is not supposed to have any reference to Socrates, nor to Delphi and its oracle. The festival involves a trip to Delos, Apollo’s alleged birthplace that he turned from desert to garden. Delphi lies north and west of Athens. Delos lies south and east. Athens stands on the center point of an axis that passes from Delphi to Delos, Apollo’s two earthly homes. So the two Apollonian sites sketch out a world that includes Athens at its center. At one extreme is the place where Socrates’ career began; at the other extreme lies Delos, where, putatively, Socrates has never been. Would it be asking too much of the reader to suggest that this dialogue itself, the “body” of Socrates, or the body of his last conversation, might be one of the gifts of thanksgiving that
Theseus’ ship is bearing to Delos? Might the priests and functionaries be carrying more than a tribute having to do with Theseus? And mightn’t this soften the raw irony of Socrates’ life being spared temporarily by a festival that putatively honors Apollo, and yet that happens as Athens rudely dishonors the god by condemning one of his favorites to death? Mightn’t this whole festival have been narratively hijacked by Plato and transformed into a sacred pilgrimage to Delos honoring Apollo, with Socrates’ last conversation, for all he has done, not for Theseus, but for Socrates?
If we allow ourselves to read Phaedo in this way could we extend our fancy and suggest that the gifts the priests are bearing to Delos, unknown to them, are not only Socrates’ last words but his entire life and work, his philosophical activity, and his dying itself, done in such a way as to honor the god? And is Socrates’ work as a philosopher a gift precisely because he always moved toward the gods, trying to know things as they know them, but always without deceiving himself that he could ever know what the gods know? And doesn’t the manner of his dying reveal that he knows, as he says in the discussion on suicide (Phaedo 61d -63a) that he belongs to the gods, and that he sees philosophy, and right dying, as two interdependent way of drawing closer to them? Is the dialogue itself, and his philosophy as a whole, as well as his dying, taken together a kind of hymn to the god, perhaps the very hymn that he is setting to verse later in the piece? (Phaedo 61b)
Read in this way the dialogue becomes a figure for a pilgrimage towards the god. As we proceed through the arguments and stories that make it up, we are perhaps showing respect to the god but also coming closer to him and to his realm in the other world. Philosophy then can be seen as both the way to the god and as an offering to him.
We refer back now to the first journey motif. If philosophy and dying are both journeys home and journeys of liberation they now reveal themselves, through the second journey motif, as forms of pilgrimage and prayer. Philosophy is both lyrically self-creating and religious, homecoming and pilgrimage.

The Third Journey: Theseus and the Minotaur

Now we arrive at the last and most complicated journey motif, the one “hidden” deepest inside the dialogue, imbedded both temporally and spatially inside the Phaedo journey and the Delos journey. When Echecrates asked what the ship sailing to Delos signified, Phaedo answered that it was the very same ship that Theseus sailed to Crete with the twice seven maidens and young men. (Phaedo, 58 b) Phaedo does not go into any detail about the story, presumably because it is sufficiently well known outside Athens that, unlike the Apollo festival, it required no elaboration. But we, as Athenians, are intimately familiar with all the details of the story (there are many!), and as we will see, in this case it is the details that matter, and that have been universally neglected in all the commentaries.
This last, epic motif is based on the familiar story about Theseus of Athens who accompanies fourteen young Athenians who must be sent each year as tribute to King Minos of Crete. Their fate is to provide food for the terrible monster, the Minotaur, product of the unnatural lust that Minos' wife Pasiphae felt for a bull who was, some say, a god in disguise. When Pasiphae bore the half-human, half-bull monster, Minos imprisoned it in the Labyrinth, a maze crafted by the master inventor/craftsman Daedalus, who was at that time in exile from Athens. The fourteen hapless young Athenians would be let loose into the Labyrinth. They would all be hunted down, killed and eaten by the monster, who would thereby sustain himself.
Theseus' journey is clearly a hero's quest. He goes to Crete expressly to slay the Minotaur, at the risk of his own life. Theseus introduces a whole set of new themes and ideas into the dialogue. He is a great hero, and heroes are people who go on dangerous quests. His journey is not as indeterminate as a homecoming or a fleeing from slavery; Theseus has a job -- to kill the Minotaur. As a hero Theseus also does something specifically heroic: he battles monsters. Monsters are a proper object of attention for heroes because heroes, like the monsters they battle, are marginal humans. If monsters stand on the unclear border between animality and humanity, between bestiality and culture, heroes generally have a strong dose of divine ancestry. Either a parent or a grandparent was a god. In Theseus’ case, myth provides him with both a divine and a human father, Poseidon and Aegeus. Heroes therefore exist at the upper register and limit of human being and are never entirely human. They demonstrate this in more than one way, but one of the ways is to encounter and overcome a variety of monsters.
Monsters stand at the opposite register from heroes. Rather than having divine parents or grandparents monsters are defined by their changeling status: they are part animal, part human. Thus, heroes occupy one margin of the human type, and monsters occupy the other, lower boundary between the human and the animal. But note that both heroes and monsters are marginal figures who are half-human, half something else, unstable composites of two opposing orders of nature and each, therefore, somewhat unnatural.
In any event Theseus does what heroes do. He enters the maze of the Labyrinth, find and kills the Minotaur, in the darkness of this man-created “underworld”, and escapes by retracing his steps using the thread that Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, provides him.
Is Socrates Theseus as well as being Phaedo and a priest of Apollo? Is Socrates a hero? In the dialogue he explicitly likens himself and Phaedo, in an ironic sense, to Herakles and Iolaus, and says that as these figures they will not let the arguments for the immortality of the soul “die”, and that they will defeat the anti-immortality arguments that Simmias and Cebes have advanced. (Phaedo, 89 b-c). The specific reference he is making is to the time when Herakles battled another monster, the Lernaean Hydra. As he was fighting this multi-headed being, the crab, Cancer, was attacking him from the rear. Iolaus helped him at this point, saving Herakles by dividing the labor of fighting two monsters/animals at once. So, Socrates aligns himself with heroes who battle monsters.
It is not surprising then that scholars such as Dorter have linked Socrates with Theseus on this basis, but again most commentators fail to make much out of this affinity. The first question is: what kind of monsters does Socrates have to fight, and how are they like and unlike the Minotaur? Second, if we can establish that Socrates sees himself as fighting monsters, and also sees philosophy as a battle against them, and also suggest that he sees dying as a kind of battle against fear and skepticism, then in establishing Socrates as a kind of hero and therefore like Theseus we can begin to ally him with Theseus who was, after all, once Athens’ king and a great Athenian figure?
The first of these "monsters" is Mormolykeia, the "bogeyman" of death, or of men's fear of death, against whom Socrates must cast charms and enchantments to soothe the child-like fears of his interlocutors. (Phaedo, 77 d–e) Interestingly, however, Socrates does not use heroic language in talking about dealing with Mormolykeia. Rather than killing the fear of death in men, or using martial metaphors to discuss it, Socrates says that he will enchant it away, sing it out of existence with endless reassurances, which might take the form of myths (likely and consoling stories about the afterlife), or poems, or of arguments that are like poems and stories in that they might not stand up to rigorous logical examination but that might console those afflicted with fear, even if they do not fully convince some people. If Socrates is to be seen as a hero, and if philosophy is to be more than the singing of consoling songs, or the weaving of soothing verbal spells, he must face more substantial opponents than the “mere” fear of death.
Indeed the “monster” Socrates must fight as if he were Herakles or Theseus is more like the Minotaur, more of a true monster, then Mormolykeia. The true enemy is Misology, which Socrates describes at length (Phaedo, 89d – 90e) Misology is defined as “hating argument” (Phaedo, 89d), and, says Socrates, “no worse evil can happen to a man” (Phaedo, 89d), than this. The reason misology is so baneful is that it consists in losing faith in arguments, or explanations, because one has used one’s reasoning powers to discern that some arguments are undependable. They seem true sometimes, but then prove false at other times. Misology is a monster because it is an unnatural hybrid between something more human, the ability to make arguments, and something less than human, an unsound or under-developed spiritual condition that makes men incapable of learning the right method of making sound arguments. It is misology, the rejection of the idea that there are any sound arguments that Socrates must fight.
He needs two things. First he needs Phaedo to cover him as Iolaus covered Herakles in the battle with the Hydra and the crab. Socrates, like Herakles, faces two opponents at once – Simmias’ harmony argument and Cebes’ “old coat” argument – both of which Socrates must be reading not as free-standing objections to the claim that the soul is immortal, but as rejections of the soundness of the arguments for immortality that he has thus far advanced. Defeating these arguments will require not only showing that they fail as arguments but much more importantly that there is a rational method of constructing arguments that will show up their insufficiencies.
Phaedo does not literally “cover” Socrates because it is Socrates who copes with both arguments. But Phaedo is Socrates’ Iolaus in a narrative sense, in that he carries on Socrates’ mission against misology after Socrates is unable to do so. This close identification between Phaedo/Iolaus and Socrates/Herakles/Theseus reinforces the identification I urged in interpreting the first journey motif.
Second Socrates needs a weapon to fight misology. Theseus had two; the sword Ariadne gave him and the thread that she had him tie to a pillar outside the Labyrinth. Socrates has his method of argument, given to him in Symposium by his Ariadne, Diotima. Socrates will use this method, dialectic, or logos, or whatever we need to call it, to kill misology and then to safely weave his way back out of the labyrinthine traps it lays for the unwary. One way to see the dialogue is as itself a labyrinth, a set of dark passages through which Socrates wends his sure way using his “thread”, the logos.
So, we can say that Socrates has journeyed into the labyrinth of arguments against the immortality of the soul and into the labyrinth of skepticism that espouses the position that because one argument failed, all must necessarily fail. If this self-contradictory stance convinces anyone, they will suffer a true death because misology makes thought impossible and belief untenable. It is this that the dialogue sees as the genuine enemy. Fear of death can be quieted by an array of arguments, stories and examples from life. But this fear will be unchecked if the people to whom Socrates is singing do not believe the arguments he advances and the tales he tells because they are misologists. So misology more than fear of death must be attacked and slain, as it metaphorically is, not by any single argument in the dialogue but by the total ensemble of arguments, tales and examples.
Fighting monsters, whether physical or logical, allies Socrates with Theseus. But is there a further political subtext here as well, once the identification has been made? Theseus is Athens’ greatest hero. He was a king of the city and fought off many enemies, including the Amazons, and it was said that his spirit appeared to rally the Athenian forces during the Persian invasion, at the battle of Marathon. His bones, a huge skeleton, were found in Scyros, where he died, and brought back to Athens, where their tomb became a refuge for outcasts, a protection for the otherwise unprotected. Finally, Theseus was treacherously driven from power and into exile. He was then, as treacherously, murdered by his supposed host, the king of Scyros.
Is Plato making the outrageous suggestion that the dead Socrates should now be elevated to a status equal to that of Theseus? Is he proposing that Socrates, in his own way, was a kind of philosopher-king of the city, protecting it, not from weapons-wielding physical enemies but from more subtle spiritual and conceptual foes? Does he also mean us to remember that Theseus, too, was rejected by the city he led, that he was exiled, and that his exile led to his murder/execution? Is Plato suggesting that the rejected and “murdered” “hero”, Socrates, should be, or someday will be, rehabilitated as an Athenian hero? And his bones be memorialized as a refuge for outcasts (such as, perhaps, Phaedo?) Or is Plato proposing something even more outrageous, that Socrates’ “bones”, and his monument as well, are precisely these dialogues, that also serve as a refuge for outcasts, a safe haven from the ravages of an untrustworthy city? We cannot say that Plato intended any of these outrageous comparisons, but it is clear that a case can be made that in Phaedo Socrates and Theseus have an interesting, even provocative, connection.

The Three Journeys: Some Tentative Conclusions:
Here then we see philosophy as a kind of combat, a battle against misology, and a journey into the heart of the enemy. If we graft this set of images on to the others we have already accumulated we see three journey motifs: the lyrical personal journey home that is also a journey of liberation from a form of enslavement, a journey in which one carries a gift inside one, in Phaedo's case the gift of Socrates, in Socrates' case the gift of his vision and practice. Under this rubric both death and philosophy are also foreshadowed as kinds of journeys home and as practices of liberation. Second, in the journey to Delos, death and philosophy are also represented as journeys to the gods, to pay homage to them, and to return to them, as well. This is the sacred motif, in which the business of dying and practice of philosophy are both forms of prayer and pilgrimage. Finally, the journey of death and philosophy are also hero quests in which an enemy has to be found and overcome, or else neither death nor philosophy can survive. In this case the two "monsters" to be slain could be the fear of death and misology, but misology, as we have argued above, is by far the strongest candidate.
Lyric, sacred and epic -- three kinds of journeys, three reads on the role and meaning of death and of philosophy, and only two of the journeys, that of Theseus and that of the priests to Delos, have been completed when the dialogue takes place. Phaedo's journey home, his homecoming and liberation, are still in suspense even though misology has been slain and the gods are satisfied. Phaedo is still en route, and the suggestion is that Socrates too, as well as philosophy and death, are also not quite home yet. I mean that in Phaedo there is no final resolution to the question of dying, and the efficacy of philosophy is still in suspense, although one could make a strong case that the manner of Socrates’ dying existentially vindicates both dying and philosophy.
This reading instruction or context setting tells us that both death and philosophy can be understood as kinds of journeys and that in this respect they parallel each other. When Socrates says in Phaedo that philosophy is a preparation for death he means it, in the sense that philosophy properly conducted leads us "home" not to a site in this world but to Ideas that exist somewhere other than this world. Philosophy tends to take one away from the immediate, from the extraordinarily strong pull of the body's desires and the allure of perception, to a world of pure thoughts and deathless ideas. Even if the soul cannot see these things clearly from the perspective of this world, it knows these things are real, and seems to derive some benefits from affining itself with them, whatever they are -- and what they are, we must admit it, is never very clear, in Phaedo or in any other of Plato's dialogues. But lack of clarity, either in Plato's presentation or in the sort of knowledge humans can have in this world, does not mean that Plato ever doubted that whatever these things are, they are real, and a fitting "home" for the human soul.
This affinity is much more pronounced as death approaches because death draws one away from the body even as it reasserts the centrality of the body for most people. I mean that for Plato dying is about getting closer to whatever these things are because one is departing this confusing, intoxicating world for another in which everything will be clearer, if one has lived the right way. And the means of departure is death. But as Socrates says we have to learn how to die because the mere act of dying is not the entrance into a world of pure objects that nurture the longings of the soul. It can be the entrance to a nightmare world of half-existence in which one, dead, longs for the very things, the desires and perceptions that kept one's soul from achieving itself in life. And what is most peculiar is that it is the soul itself, which seems made to know and bask in the higher things, that has a deep hunger for the lower things.
If one does not live the right sort of life -- and to read this piece one is convinced that Plato believed that most people did not lead this life -- one will end up another sort of monster, half-alive, half-dead, hovering on the margin between the two conditions, never properly attached to earthly life or liberated from it, caught in the labyrinth created by one's own unnatural desires.
So, both philosophy and death, in Phaedo, liberate the soul to know higher things. Here, however, death is also a quest and a contest, as is philosophy, to overcome the fear of it and a misunderstanding of it. Misology is a danger around the issue of death in particular because it is in the face of the terrible pressure of death that people tend to become misologists. So much depends on trying to prove that one does not really die that people can become hypercritical in the face of this pressure and if arguments manifest flaws, which they must do in the face of death, whose other side remains unknown, people tend to lose all faith in argument when what is really happening is that arguers are marshalling the best evidence and reasons for believing in immortality, and these reasons and this evidence might not be very good. But losing all faith in arguments because they cannot prove what cannot, in this life, be proven, is a large mistake. One cannot expect more from arguments than they can reasonably give, and so in facing death we must make a journey into the heart of the way arguments get made and vindicate the process in all its limited glory.
Thus the rich tapestry of the journey motifs that are suggested in the opening sentences of the Phaedo. What they collectively suggest is something radical and important – namely that both dying and philosophy are, genuinely, forms of passage, journeys, rather than dead ends. And perhaps even more radically Plato seems to be suggesting that even though there is a religious component to doing philosophy, the passage that philosophy makes beyond dying, the way it transforms death from something that we suffer to something whose meaning we create, is the nub of what make makes being a philosopher worth the effort. Philosophy transfigures death, without godly intervention – which does not mean that we cannot then honor the gods for giving us the nous to achieve our own deaths.
The best instruction about how to read and appreciate these three suggestive motifs, none of which is identical to the other and none of which reduces to any of the others, is to re-read what Simmias says about achieving truth in these matters. After Socrates has presented his first set of arguments for the immortality of the soul, Simmias states that (Phaedo, 85 c-d) when one is faced with such questions as the fate of the soul, which he thinks that it is all but impossible to answer in this world, (Phaedo, 86c) one has only two recourses. As he puts the matter: (Phaedo, 86d)
For he must do one of two things: either he must find out
or discover the truth about these things, or he must take whatever
human doctrine is best and hardest to disprove and, embarking on it
as upon a raft, sail upon it through life in the midst of dangers.

We could read this passage as a striking, lyrically powerful version of a Socratic commonplace, namely that the arguments and positions we ought to accept, as philosophers, are only those that stand up to the most relentless testing. This is the way of the elenchus. But is this what Simmias means in this case? Recall that he has already admitted that such questions as the fate of the soul are all but impossible to answer. So it is not as if he were relying on the elenchus to produce a deductively impeccable argument. What he must be looking for is an argument or arguments that stand up best against attack, not at perfect or wholly conclusive arguments. And in the case of answering a question nearly impossible to answer the arguments might not be very strong at all and might not, strictly speaking, be arguments in the ordinary sense at all. These logoi might, instead, represent an array, a family, in Wittgenstein’s sense, of stories, themes, locales, poems, myths, plausible and consoling fictions, and relatively weak arguments from analogy, or arguments based on debatable hypotheses – which is exactly what one gets in Phaedo. Just as Simmias himself employs an analogical figure (the raft) and a metaphor (life is a stormy sea) to weave a dramatic cautionary tale (one must cling to the best “raft” in life’s stormy sea) to gesture toward, but certainly not to prove, the difficulty of answering the question about the fate of the soul, so he, and by extension Plato, might be endorsing just such an assembly of strategies as legitimate components of a philosophical practice that must persuade a variety of different people about an issue about which no one, including Socrates, can have certainty.
The point is reinforced when, after Simmias and Cebes present their arguments against the immortality of the soul, Phaedo breaks off his performance and shares with Echecrates that the company in the jail were all thrown into a state of anxiety because they had all been persuaded by the first wave of Socrates’ pro-immortality arguments. Now, equally persuaded by the counter-arguments, they did not know what to believe. Echecrates allows that he shared the same feelings. (Phaedo, 88c)
The point here is not that the assembled devotees lose faith but rather that in this matter of the soul no arguments are conclusive, and many are alluring. Plato’s point is that this lack of certainty cannot lead us to lose faith in argument itself and become misologists. Uncertainty must drive us in the other direction, to look for that techné of logoi, the craft of argument making that will best answer the difficult questions philosophy, and life, pose. It is never clear in Phaedo whether Plato believes he has achieved this techné, but what is clear, and is illustrated in the three journey motifs we have analyzed, is that when questions cannot yield certainty every linguistic and conceptual resource can and must be enlisted in assembling the most plausible and persuasive picture of a truth we might not, in this life, ever be able to attain in its unvarnished form. The three journey motifs are, I believe, important parts of that plausible picture.

Death, Lives and video Streams

Death, Lives and Video Streams

Professor Kevin D. O’Neill
University of Redlands
Redlands. California

Running Head: Death Lives

Kevin O’Neill is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Redlands who has
published and presented papers on representations of death from ancient Greece to 21st century America. He has also written about, and participated in, experimental higher education and interdisciplinary studies and done work in adult education.
Kevin O’Neill
6200 Del Valle Drive
Los Angeles CA 90048
323-841-5171
koneill41@mac.com

Death, Lives and Video Streams

Abstract
This paper discusses two topics. First, it presents an analysis of the canonical funerary corpse prepared by morticians and discusses how this corpse serves two functions. It tames death by reappropriating the corpse for culture, and it serves as a focus for two kinds of memories: the individual/psychological and the essential/Platonic. But since the mortuary corpse has limits -- it can only help us to remember and offers no information about the afterlife. American culture has supplemented both this corpse and traditional religious accounts with many new forms of immortality, one of which is the second topic of this paper. One of the most interesting is that offered by the Cassity brothers at their Forever cemeteries. There one can ‘live’ on forever in a professionally produced filmed biography that is always available as streaming online video. This new option offers a needed supplement to the memory-bound corpse because the newly immortal filmed individual has the possibility for a post mortem career as a video entity.

In the long run, metaphysics does itself no good
in scorning its own physics.
(Debray, 2001)


The American corpse has a fixed look and a stable identity. It is an icon created by the funeral industry with the complicity of a public that wants its dead to assume a canonical, consoling form. This iconic corpse appears timeless and at peace. It rests without moving in its perfectly fitted casket. It lies face up, hands folded on the lower abdomen. Catholic corpses often have rosary beads twined around their fingers. Protestants sometimes “hold” Bibles. Each corpse is dressed up. Its hair is meticulously combed and its face carefully composed. The eyes are sealed shut, the cheeks built out with special lifts, the lips sewn closed, the rictus of death flattened into a noncommittal line. The face is tilted up slightly so the skin of the neck does not wrinkle or gather, and inside the casket there is a slight elevation up and to the right so that the corpse presents itself more clearly, not sunk too far into the plush fabric that lines the casket. The corpse’s face is made up using special cosmetics. The casket is open so that the corpse’s legs below the waist are not visible.
If the casket is closed everyone present knows how it would look were the casket open. We know that the corpse is dressed in a suit or dress [or however deemed appropriate] and is embalmed and properly arranged. Were we to open the casket we would see the expected object looking its expected way.
Increasing numbers of Americans are being cremated. But even the corpses that disappear into the furnace, even those whose only “appearance” is at a memorial service still pass under the control of professional morticians. The standard funeral, and the mortuary corpse displayed in its casket, remain the type and this “specter” haunts every memorial service. (Habenstein and Lamers, 1990, Laderman, 2003).
This iconic corpse preparation is a response to a fundamental fact that is a challenge: human beings die, and when they die they leave behind corpses. Aries (1980), argues that death presents a challenge to human culture. Death is a “natural kind” (Quine, 1969.) This means that the dead body occurs without reference to cultural encoding. Death happens whether we want it to or not, and we are compelled to provide am meaning for it. It erupts into ordered life and takes whomever it “chooses”, whenever it chooses. Because of this transgressive and disruptive quality, death has to be tamed. Death is wild. (Aries, 1980). And this is a major source of the impulse to create civilizations, city walls and laws. Death must be contained, its lack of meaning remade into significance. Taming death takes many forms. One form is the honorific regard most cultures give to corpses. The American funerary corpse represents such an investment in social order.
In this essay I will accomplish two things. First, I offer an analysis of the taming of death the iconic American copse accomplishes. Second, I note its limitations and present an analysis of a “supplement”, the video corpse, which compensates for the iconic corpse’s shortcomings in a way that replaces or supplement traditional religious narratives. This re-imagining of the afterlife of the dead exploits the representational techniques offered by film, sound recording, and the Internet, but does so in a way that keeps the corpse under the control of funeral professionals and builds a conceptual and emotional bridge between the mortuary corpse and its cinematic iterations.

The Tamed Corpse: Icon of Memory

Is the sword of biological death so sharp
That there is no lingering association between corpse and
person?
(Harrison, 2003, p. 143)

Corpses earn respect because on one hand they are so “short-lived” and at the same time represent a terrible challenge and unsolvable metaphysical conundrum. In the western tradition, when corpses disappear into the ground or vault, they take with them some of our deepest hopes and unanswered questions. The person, now dead, was just conscious, like us. It possessed agency, intention, motives, memory, the capacity to respond, the ability to help or harm. It is often the corpse of someone we loved. Now it seems to have none of its former characteristics. And yet it still looks like the person who it just was
Yet, almost immediately (Nuland, 2000), we know that this is not our beloved but a dead body. The question is – where did all this – the agency, intention, responsiveness, the indefinable something more, -- go ? Is there a place where we can look for it and have a hope of finding it? Or is it just lost? Does it, like the attunement of Simmias’ lyre (Plato, trans. 1999), dissipate when death comes? And if it is lost then are we lost as well?
The agonizing difficulty here is that the only site that we know to look for whatever is lost is the body from which whatever it is, is lost . Western religious traditions would have us look to another world, but that world is frustratingly invisible, and we are left with nothing but the dead body. But that body is the last place where we can hope to find what is lost. It is what it is because whatever made it a person has departed or dissipated, and is deconstructing itself according to well-known physical principles. This unaltered dead body epitomizes Nature’s wildness. It is no longer an expression of anything that belongs to human culture and human expectation. Martin Heidegger (1962) captured this frustration when he wrote, that an individual’s death represents the “impossibility of possibility”. (p.307). A dead person, the corpse, no longer has possibilities. In a culture in which a person’s possibilities count for everything, Heidegger’s characterization captures our problem: what looks like a person, is not any sort of person at all, but the mere appearance of one.
What do we do with this disappointing thing that looks exactly like who the person just was and which can do nothing that persons do? We can reclaim the body for culture, and soften the terrible loss we feel, by making it into what it is not, by “remastering” it as an image of what it cannot be, the once living person. This is what the American funeral industry largely exists to do: to create “memory pictures” (Laderman, 2003 ) of the once living in the form of the mortuary corpse.
Transforming the dead body into an apparently stable and timeless mortuary corpse temporarily tames death by reclaiming the corpse from its otherness, in which it is subject to the laws of decay, and turning it into a site for memories and even future expectations.
This transformation requires a major cultural intervention. The corpse has to be remade from a natural object into a cultural object. It has to be turned from itself into an image of itself. But this image is not exactly of itself as corpse, but of the person, that the corpse no longer is. This is possible because, as Harrison (2003) says the corpse retains some ontological “residue” of the once living person
Making the corpse cultural entails, in standard American funeral practice, that it be embalmed, This treatment insures that even after the corpse is committed to the earth Nature cannot soon take over immediately because the dressed up body in its steel or wood casket, inserted into a concrete vault is temporarily impermeable to natural processes. It is as if, in defiance of the reality that the dead body represents, we insert, into the earth an indigestible cultural object that still looks like the person and the cultural agent that it can no longer be. “We” go into the ground as defiant repudiations of the reality of decay.
This mortuary corpse, prepared as a performance piece by the funeral director is intended to accomplish this ontological sleight of hand by serving as a site for memory of two kinds. First, the prepared corpse, which is remade to look as much as possible like the living individual reminds us of the particularities of the dead person’s life. A corpse that looks “just like” Helen implicitly contests the corpse’s natural tendency to look less and less like Helen as time goes on. It offers a culturally controlled “portrait” or stable image of Helen inscribed directly on Helen’s recalcitrant body. We can then use this fixed image of Helen as she was in life to do what the unreconstructed corpse forbade us to do. We can “find” Helen in the site from which she has departed. The mortician’s arts have paradoxically returned the “living” Helen from her lostness, made her available, not as literal presence, but as image. Morticians cannot bring back the dead. They are not necromancers. But they can reimagine, or literally re-image the dead on the surface of bodies. In doing this they allow us, who loved or cared for Helen, to know her again as a living presence, at least in image and memory.
What we see and remember is a psychological portrait, a representation of Helen in her individuality and privacy. We remember quirky things about Helen, and things she and we did together. In this sense, Helen-as-corpse is like a snapshot, a fragile and fragmented memento mori whose private particularity, whose existential singleness, is here touchingly invoked.
In this sense, the American mortuary corpse honors and ritualizes the modern, secular subject (Foltyn, 1996) the very person whose death so many pundits (e.g., Mitford, 1963; Heinz, 1999) have dismissed as an empty commercialized show. On this level the corpse produced by the funeral industry seems to “work”. Evidence for this is the fact that this corpse has persisted past the criticisms leveled at it from Mitford’s attack to those of the death awareness movement. (Webb, 1997; Kubler-Ross, 1969)
On a second level the funerary corpse provokes a different mode of memory that addresses the metaphysical question of where the person in the corpse, the ‘ghost in the machine’ (Ryle, 1949) “goes.” The funerary corpse, in its putative changelessness, is meant to reveal something more than the historical individual, namely that person as invisible, the essential person of whom the body, while living, was merely an envelope. It reminds us that the embalmed body bodies forth the inner and mysterious invisibility of the Soul that Plato introduced into Western consciousness and that have never left our cultural imaginary.
Just as post mortem photography in the 19th century was touted as a revelation of the true inner person – an idea that Nathaniel Hawthorne used in The House of the Seven Gables (Hawthorne, 1851)- so the funerary arts purport to manufacture a corpse that mysteriously unmasks who Helen really was (Laderman, 2003; Laderman,1998). Whatever it is that “passed” or “departed” still lingers with the corpse and can be gestured toward, by the right embalming job, which draws this hidden essence out of the body’s recesses and makes it visible, just as the soul was visible in the live Helen.
The great virtue and also the inherent metaphysical limitation of the funerary art is that it captures this Platonic identity, the hidden core of a person, as well as the historical individual whom that soul enlivened, but does so only in the register of memory. It allows those left behind to re-call (call back, re-invoke) the Soul that is now departed, and to re-member (or re-assemble) it, but nothing about the mortuary arts has power to help that Soul toward its new life, or to connect the living with that still-living Essence. The representation of the soul remains a representation. Morticians practice a metaphysics of absence, or, of provisional, representational presence, not one of presence. There is always already a Derridean slippage (Derrida, 1974) between the looks of a corpse and the absent essence to which that look purports to refer.
When Americans shared a religious metanarrative (Lyotard, 1979), the Platonic essence represented by the embalmed corpse had a secure Christian path plotted out after death. But as Americans moved away from this shared vision, narratives about what happened to the invisible Soul proliferated. In this shift in belief, the secular nature of the embalmed corpse was a hidden strength, because as representation of inner soul it was neutral as to either the continued existence or particular religious provenance of what was represented. Americans create and sustain their own versions of the soul, and the mortuary corpse does not by itself tell us any single story about the soul’s future fate. (Heinz, 1999; Barol, 2000).
In the USA, there are several post-Christian answers to the limitations of the mortuary corpse: mediumship, crionics, New Age ceremonies, borrowings from Eastern religions, gay and feminist ceremonies and rituals that draw on Native American beliefs. (Webb, 1999) There is a Christian response to the corpse – the Rapture , which promises that the bodies of believers will be taken directly to Heaven without suffering death. (LaHaye, 1999)
Each of these answers addresses, the questions: what was lost and where did it go? How do we contact whatever left, and what relationship can we have to it? Each answer corrects the failure of the mortuary corpse to offer anything more than a site for memories, and each does so by postulating a distinctive post mortem “career” for the dead.
The Virtual Dead
One new option is what I call ”virtual immortality” a new narrative about the fate of the soul that is a direct extension of the mortuary arts. It is controlled to some extent by morticians and offers a virtual immortality that is in some ways entirely new and in other ways a reference to both film history and much earlier traditions of post mortem photography.
The Cassity brothers, Brent and Tyler, purchased Hollywood Memorial Park in 1998 for $375,000. The 60-acre cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, which contains within its walls the small Jewish cemetery, Beth Olam, was originally opened in 1899 and is Hollywood's oldest burial ground. It was solely owned for many years by the controversial figure Jules Roth, from whom the State of California purchased/took over the then-derelict cemetery in the mid-1990s. Roth had looted the cemetery's endowment and when ownership was transferred the site was making more money from disinterments than from new burials (Lyons, 1998; Spindler; 1998; Cloud, 2000). The Cassity brothers were allowed to buy the place because they pledged to invest several millions of dollars in improving and maintaining the property (Lyons, 1998 Spindler, 1998, Kramer, 1999; Barol, 2004; Resting Place, n.d.).
The brothers, from a Missouri family that had owned funeral homes and cemeteries for two generations, came to the business of reviving Hollywood Memorial with definite ideas. Tyler Cassity, who directly manages Hollywood Forever, the new name for the cemetery, holds a degree in English literature from Columbia University and dreamed of becoming a novelist. This interest in creating narratives is reflected in the cemetery's online self-description:
We believe it’s time cemeteries offered more than a name and date etched in stone. That's why Hollywood Forever Cemetery is a "Library of Lives" with thousands of interactive Life Stories made from film clips, photos, and written and spoken words.
We believe everyone has a life story that deserves to be shared and preserved for future generations.
Our professional LifeStory specialists are dedicated to helping you gather photos and film clips, audio recordings and documents, all captured and stored permanently in our unique Life Story Theaters. (Cassity, n.d.)
As one navigates the Forevernetwork.com site, of which the Hollywood Forever site is a part, one finds examples of these LifeStories, which include, as the blurb above indicates, film clips, photographs, family trees and music as well as audio.
These LifeStories are only the most elaborate and best produced of a welter of memorial sites online. Companies such as Legacy.com, Memory-of.com, Mem.com, Last Memories.com and PartingWishes.com all offer low cost space to set up memorial web sites. The companies not only offer locations, but also provide simple software so that people with little computer savvy can set up and maintain such sites. These companies compete with millions of individual memorial sites, which are in turn parts of larger Web Rings, such as the United States Marine Corps Webring and the God Bless America Webring. (Howington, n.d.) There are also several sites, such as the Memorial of Love Webring, dedicated exclusively to ongoing memorials to and discussions of those who died in the 9/11 attacks. (loveatchristmas, n.d.)
These sites have provisions for leaving email messages for the dead and for the bereaved family and friends; some are linked to chat rooms and message boards and strangers often visit memorial websites and leave encouraging messages. New film and photos and text can be added at will. As a Washington Post article relates, people keep adding new material so that these sites take on a life, or afterlife, of their own (Noguchi, 2006).
This theme of a "second life", or of virtual immortality, is reinforced at Hollywood Forever because their post mortem offerings go well beyond the relatively haphazard assemblages of sounds and images that characterize most memorial websites. Each Forever cemetery has its own studio on the grounds of the cemetery. This is a separate enterprise called Forever Studios, and, as various commentators note, especially in Hollywood there is no shortage of well-trained and underemployed film editors, sound specialists, and producers to help craft coherent "second life" narratives for the dead. (Forever Studios, n.d.; Alm, 1999; Barol, 2004) As the prose on the website says, the Forever "Biographers" work with friends and family to create LifeStories from "photos, spoken descriptions, text, video clips, old film reels, awards or other memorabilia." (Cassity, n.d.) All this information is transferred to digital format and put first onto hard disks and CD-ROMS or DVDs, then online.
This can be a sophisticated process: film reels and video clips as well as photographs, whether film or digital, sound recordings and written text are all integrated into a single digitally mastered streaming video in which old photographs and film clips are edited, enhanced and cropped as necessary, and in which grainy sound is purified. People who purchase the high-end Platinum package will receive professionally conducted and shot interviews hosted and produced by the Forever Biographers, as well as the services of a Forever editor, and the taping of a remembrance party for the deceased, or for the person who will someday be deceased. (Forever Studios, n.d.; Hampel,1998 ; Cloud, 2000).
One can watch sample videos and see that the deceased are not simply memorialized after the fact. The Platinum level LifeStories typically contain first person videos of the deceased talking reflectively, from beyond death, about their lives, and inviting their loved ones to come over when they are ready to join them in the afterlife. Such videos are shot as scripted interviews. Technicians from Hollywood Forever serve as sound and film experts and the cemetery provides an interviewer, as well as scene dressers. People make the videos before they die, sometimes years before the event when they are pain free and entirely coherent.
Such self-presentations are integrated into biographical “documentaries” that have been compared to televised A&E biographies (Forever LifeStories, n.d.; Cloud, 2000), and include photographs, sound bites from children and friends, bits of video, text, and pictures.
Every LifeStory is "preserved as a permanent part of the Forever Memorial Archive." "maintained by the Forever Endowment Care Fund." (Forever LifeStories, n.d.) These LifeStories “live” on optical drives and the Worldwide Web. Like the embalmed corpse -- or even better than the embalmed corpse -- they are "preserved" as a permanent part of a public record available on line. The dead have become effectively ‘immortal’ (Alm, 1999; Cloud, 2000, Barol, 2004) not purely on the Internet, but anchored to their earthly “homes” in real cemeteries where real corpses, the familiar mortuary corpses, along with the equally familiar urns filled with ashes, serve as stable referent and necessary ground for this new immortality.
The most modest as well as the most elaborate of the LifeStories are always playing at the "Forever Theaters", which are both virtual theaters found on the website and also "real" theaters spotted around the grounds of the Forever cemeteries. One writer describes them as looking like ATM machines. (Seay, 1998) They are touch screen computer outlets that permit visitors to access videos of any of the dead interred at a Forever cemetery anywhere in the country. This author has tried them at Hollywood Forever and can attest that they are eminently user-friendly.
The Cassity brothers have branched out from creating post mortem streaming video of the dead, offering immortality to the living as well. The Studios will track a child through his or her education, recording voice and video each year from kindergarten to college.(Forever On Campus, n.d.) They create no cost video packages that can be sent overseas to loved ones serving in combat zones (Forever Veteran Stories n .d.) They have even initiated a program at the University of Missouri, of which Brent Cassity is a graduate, to memorialize alumni For a price (Mizzou Alumni Association News, 2004).
All this pre-mortem footage can be tastefully integrated into a post mortem LifeStory at the proper time. Tracking one's whole life in video, from cradle to grave, and doing so self-consciously, will create much better and more coherent material for the post mortem biography than could possibly be generated from random digital photos and jerky minicam sweeps. And if Forever professionals either make or direct the making of the images, so much the better.
Here we get a glimpse of a new sense of life, one lived as a kind of performance in order for it to look good on film., a life lived as a series of "photo ops", rather than as a series of spontaneous events. Here we approach Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal: “real” life will be that which appears on video, and the best life will be that lived over and over on the Moebius strip of a streaming video loop. (Baudrillard, 1988). Shades of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return! (Nietzsche, 1999 , Sontag, 1977)
The reappropriation of the dead into biopics and photomontages rescues them from the immobility and transience of the funeral scene, and frees their memories from the undependable confines of the individual mourner’s consciousness. No matter how well laid out the corpse might be all that will be left is the internal memory, or, in rare instances, a photograph of the corpse. In the Cassity biopics, the images are all externalized and objectified, and arranged in consequential sequences that overwrite the memories of those left behind and replace them with undying representations of the “real” dead person. The dead return to life in a virtual sense and live or relive a new life in their biographical films.
A more powerful and subtler redemption is also going on in the production of the biopic. Individuals remembered in snapshots and home movies are inevitably surrounded with that sense of isolation and melancholy that both Roland Barthes (1982) and Susan Sontag (1977) find in all photographs. Photographs are intensely private and intensely ephemeral. Few artifacts suggest the contingency of an individual life in the way that photographs do. They reek of loss and impermanence. All the concrete details of fashion, hairstyle, cars, and the ways in which people hold themselves, refer to a specific time and place and to nothing else save the fact that this time and place are irretrievably lost.
One reason why individual photographs are so poignant and heartbreaking is that they occur in no context other than their sweet Otherness. What is missing is a meta-narrative, the sense of the photo as one moment in a stream of other moments that, taken together, make up a consequential narrative. Photographs ordered in a series that tell a story lose much of their poignancy because now we see where this or that isolated scene is leading, we understand that this moment is not self-contained. And this [what?]is precisely what happens in the Cassity brothers’ biopics.
An individual life, which might really be a series of discontinuous images that taken together do not add up to a compelling story, is assimilated to the strong narrative convention of the biographical film. Such films, like life, have an internal order – a beginning, middle and end. Making a film of a life presupposes that that life had a story in it that was worth filming, just as a 19th century oil portrait presupposed that its subject had a presence worth painting.
The relocation of the dead from the grave and urn to the Internet, as moving images, opens possibilities that the Cassitys have not yet exploited. According to Mr. Bill Obrock, a Forever employee, the dead will soon be able to be remastered as holograms and might some day engage in “live” conversations with the living, giving responses consistent with their in-life personalities. (Seay, 1999) There is even discussion of depositing samples of DNA at the Forever sites (Seay, 1999) so that people, or their descendants have the option to produce clones in the future.
These possibilities raise questions about the identity of the dead. Who lives on in the biopic? Do the dead become quasi-fictional characters whose identities are produced by the editorial “spin” they or their loved ones put on their biographies? Obituaries already do this. How much powerful when actual images and film clips are edited to produce the effect. And if the dead become characters in biopics do they then develop new virtual identities as characters in such online events? Further, do these new manufactured identities, which are crafted from the raw material of film and recording and photograph, then effectively replace inconsistent, fading and fragmentary memory? Are the Cassitys creating a new “species”, the changeless, fictionally produced dead with whom we the living can interact, thereby changing both their identities, and ours?
If all that I wrote comes true, won’t the dead, to use media theorist Thomas de Zengotita’s provocative term, be mediated beings, creations of the media but who assume “lives” of their own on-screen, lives for which new chapters can be written as they interact with the living and “star” in post mortem SIMS games? Mightn’t the edited biopics, and the simulated afterlives, be even better than the real lives, so that, fulfilling a Western Christian hope, the afterlife really will be better than earthly life, but in ways no Christian Father ever dreamed (de Zengotita, 2005)?

Conclusion
The video dead supplement the mortuary corpse, while “critiquing” it. These dead supplement it by using it as a point de départ that they both require and get beyond. Without the iconic mortuary corpse to represent both individual memories and a timeless soul, virtual versions of the corpse, the ForeverStories, would not be shaped to produce life narratives that represent the Platonic self, or to build these narratives from the individual fragments of sound and image that everyone in our culture leaves behind. The virtual dead journey to places the iconic mortuary dead can never go, but they can be traced back to the mortuary corpse as extended expressions of its ability to provoke memory of the inner and outer person.
But in an age of virtual representation, who are the real dead? In a consumer culture blessed with technology and personal freedom, death, and the corpse, are always troped, available to be reworked into a new shape that will always attempt to cover over death’s irresistible and ultimately undeniable wildness.

References

Abcarian, R. (2006, June 13). In death they do not part – in fact, they have a party. Los Angeles
Times, (Calendar; Calendar Desk; Part E; Page 1). Retrieved January 12, 2007 from http://web.lexis-nexis.com.libproxy.csun.edu.
About Forever Forever Studios Forever Cemeteries Retrieved January 12, 2007 from
http://www.forevercemeteries.com/AboutForever.htm.
Alm, R. (1999, December 23). Resting in peace the high-tech way. The Kansas City Star, (Metropolitan Edition), pp. 1, 6-7. Retrieved January 11, 2007 from
http://www.kcstar.com
Aries, P. (1980). Now And At The Hour. (H. Weaver, Trans.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Association News. (2004, Spring). Breathing Life into Mizzou’s History. Mizzou:The Magazine
of the MU Alumni Association, pp. 40-41. Retrieved January 11, 2007 from
http://www.mizzou.com
Barol, B. (2004, March 1). Death & the Salesman Irreverence and death don’t mix. Unless you’re the Cassity brothers, who bring a show-biz sensibility to the funeral business. Fortune Small Business. Retrieved January 22, 2007 from http://www.magazine-directory.com/Fortune-Small-Business.htm.
Barthes, R. Richard Howard, translator (1982). Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang.
Baudrillard, J. Q (1995). Simulacra and Simulation. (Sheila Faria Glaser, Trans.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Cassity, T. (n.d.). “Library of Lives” Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Retrieved January 15, 2007 from http://www.hollywoodforever.com/LibraryofLives.htm.
Cloud, J. (2000, July 10). Meeting Your (Film)Maker: The Cassity boys want their cemeteries to tell your life story. Time (Special Issue: Life on the Mississippi), pp. 65-66. Retrieved January 11, 2007 from http://www.time.com/time/printout
Cullen, L.T. (2003, July 7). What a Way to Go. Time. Retrieved January 23, 2007 from http://www.time.com/time/printout/
Debray, R. (2004). God: An Itinerary. (Jeffrey Mehlman, Trans.). New York: Verso.
Derrida, J. (1974) Of Grammatology. (Gayatri Chrakrvorty Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
deZengotita, T. (2005). Mediated: The Hidden Effects of Media on People, Places and Things. New York: Bloomsbury.
Featured LifeStory Forever LifeStories Forever Studios Retrieved January 10, 2007 from http://www.forever-studios.com/lifestories/
Foltyn, J. L. 1996. Dead Beauty: The Preserva¬tion, Memorializa¬tion, and Destruction of Beauty
in Death. In G. Howarth & P. Jupp (Eds), Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of Death, Dying, and Disposal, p. 72-83). New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Forever Image Services Forever Studios Retrieved January 11, 2007 from http://www.forever-studios.com/imageservices/
Forever LifeStories Forever Studios. Retrieved January 11, 2007 from http://www.forever-studios.com/lifestories/lifestory.cfm?Archive_l
Forever On Campus Forever Studios. Retrieved January 10, 2007 from http://www.forever-studios.com/oncampus/
Forever Veteran Stories. Forever Studio. Retireved January 10, 2007 from http://www.forever- studios.com/veterans/
Gendreau, P. (2006, August 24). “Expiration Date” Kicks Off L.A. Theatrical Release With Unique Outdoor Screening At Historical Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Market Wire. Retrieved January 10, 2007 from http://web.lexis-nexis.com.libproxy.csun.edu
Habenstein, R.W. and Lamers, W.M.. (1960) The History of American Funeral Directing. Milwaukee: Buffin Press.
Hampel, P. (1998, October 21). Interactive Digital Biography pays tribute to former Vietnam ‘Unknown’. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, (Metro). Retrieved from http://forever-studios.com/lifestories/press-window.cfm?picture=postoct.jpg
Harrison, R.P. (2003)The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hawthorne, N. (1981). House of the Seven Gables. New York: Bantam Books.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. (John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Trans.). San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.
Heinz, D. (1999) The Last Passage. New York: Oxford University Press.
Howington, G.L. (n.d.) A Marine Died Today. Retrieved January 15, 2007 from http://home.att.net/~jrhsc/marine.html
Howington, G.L. (n.d.) Southside of the Sky. Retrieved January 22, 2007 from http://home.att.net/~jrhsc/south.html
Kramer, P. (1999, November 23). Industry’s future lies in celebrity cemetery. San Jose Mercury News. Retrieved January 12, 2007 from http://www.mercurycenter.com
Kubler-Ross, E. (1997). On Death and Dying. New York: Scribner Reprint.
Laderman, G. (2003). Rest In Peace:A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Last Memories. (n.d.) Retrieved January 23 from http://www.last-memories.com/
Library of Lives Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Retrieved January 11, 2007 from http://www.hollywoodforever.com/LibraryofLives.htm
Loveatchristmas (Manager). (n.d.) Memorial of Love: Webring is for tributes and memorials for loved ones that passed away. Retrieved January 15, 2007 from http://f.webring.com/hub?ring=memorialoflove
Lyons, C. (1999, November 8). Dream Undertaken: Cemetery sees future in vid biopics Daily Variety, p. 1, 64-65. Retrieved January 13, 2007 from http://www.forever-studios.com/lifestories/press/varietyforweb2.jpg
Lyotard, J-F. (1979). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McIlwain, C. (2005) When Death Goes Pop. New York: Peter Lang
Memory Of: Library of Love (n.d.) Retrieved January 22, 2007 from http://www.memory-of.com/public/default.aspx?aff
Mitford, J. (1963) The American Way of Death Revisited. New York: Alfred A. Knopf
My Last Email. Retrieved January 23, 2007 from http://www.mylastemail.com
Nietzsche, F. (1885/1999.). Thus Spake Zarathustra, (T. Common, Trans.). New York: Dover Books.

Noguchi, Y. (2006, May 29). Online Memorials Bring Strangers and Friends Together in Community of Grief. The Washington Post, (Section A), p.1. Retrieved January 15, 2007 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article
NPR, ( 2005, December 27) Surrounded by Tombs. (Radio broadcast). National Public Radio (NPR). All Things Considered.
Nuland, S. (1998). How We Die : Reflections On Life’s Final Chapter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf
. O’Connor, P. (2005, August 14) A Night Out With Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. New York Times, (Section 9, Column 1, Style Desk) Retrieved January 11, 2007 from http://web.lexis-nexis.com.libproxy.csun.edu
Plato, (1999). Phaedo. Translated by D. Gallop. New York: Oxford World Classics.
Quigley, C. (1996). The Corpse: A History. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co.
Quine, W,V.O. (1969) “Natural Kinds.” Ontological Relativity And Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press
Quinones, S. (2006, October 28). Making a night of Day of the Dead; the Mexican Tradition gets an L.A. twist as even non-Latinos join in at a Hollywood cemetery. Los Angeles Times, (California; Metro; Metro Desk; Part B; Pg.5) Retrieved January 11, 2007 from http://web.lexis-nexis.com.libproxy.csun.edu
Resting Place For Hollywood Immortals. (n.d.) Hollywood Forever Cemetery Retrieved January 13, 2007 from http://www.hollywoodforever.com
Ryle, G. (2000). The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. New University Editions.
Seay, E. (1998, March 16). The Grateful Dead Can Tell Their Story: Just Click A Mouse. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved January 10, 2007, from http://www.forever-studios.com/lifestories/press-window.cfm?picture=WSJWEB.jpg
Schiffman, B. (2001, October 20). Grave Business. Forbes. Retrieved January 12, 2007 from http://www.forbes.com
Siegel, R. and Jaffe, I. (2006, August 18) All Things Considered: Movies Under the Stars, Retrieved January 12, 2007 from http://web.lexis-nexis.com.libproxy.csun.edu
Sontag, S. (1977/2001). On Photography. New York: Picador.
Spindler, A. (1998, November 15). A Resting place to die for ? New York Times Magazine, (Section 6). Retrieved January 12, 2007 from http://www.forever-studios.com/lifestories/press_window.cfm?picture=NYTWEB01.jpg
Thirty Minutes Bay Area (September 18, 2005). Eco Burial. ACF Newsource Heart of America Radio. (Radio Program). CBS-5 San Francisco. Retrieved January 12, 2007 from http://www.afcnewsource.org/environmental/eco_burial.html
Warner, G.A. (2005, December 27). LA Cemeteries and a Who’s Who of Celebrities. The Associated Press State and Local Wire. Retrieved January 12, 2007 from http://web.lexis-nexis.com.libproxy.csun.edu
Webb, M. (1999). The Good Death: The New American Search to Reshape the End of Life. New York: Bantam
.

.

.

.

The Dispossession of David Lurie

The Dispossessions of David Lurie:
A Philosopher Among the Animals

Kevin D. O’Neill
Department of Philosophy
University of Redlands

Running Head: The Dispossession of David Lurie

Two things happen to David Lurie in Disgrace. He is exiled from world of men (in the generic sense) and “exiled to” or finds himself in, a world of animals in which he discovers a new understanding of the soul, and of identity, that provide him a new home, albeit one without the possibility of transcendence or salvation. He comes to believe in an embodied soul for all living things, and in unique subjectivity for all, but he rejects the idea that such a soul can live past the death of its body, even though we must honor and mourn each passing soul. Coetzee can be read as a primer for the care of souls that have no hope of transcendence.
But Coetzee also argues in Disgrace that coming to know this soul bears a heavy price. His protagonist David Lurie only discovers the world of the fully embodied soul when he has become a scapegoat, driven out of both his city environment and his country refuge by his inability to understand what he doesn’t know, and by a stiff-necked Platonizing that causes him to lose every argument in his attempts to maintain his status in the human lifeworld. Lurie can no longer think or speak as others think and speak, and is therefore thrust “down” the scale of being to the world of animals.
This is the opposite of a bildungsroman, because rather than developing Lurie devolves. It is the opposite of a story in which the hero comes to a deeper self-understanding by transcending his situation. At the end Disgrace Lurie has all but lost his name – he has become “a mad old man who sits among the dogs singing to himself”(Coetzee, 212) and (Coetzee, 145) “simply a man who began arriving on Mondays with the bags for Animal Welfare”. He, like the dog he refuses to name (Coetzee, 215), has become anonymous. What little self-understanding he ever thought he had is gone. As he tells Bev Shaw (Coetzee, 210), “I don’t know what the question is, anymore.” He has lost whatever idea he ever had of himself, and become more like the dogs among which he lives, a body among other bodies. His idea of himself has become not the but an “idea of the world”, and it is this idea that we shall, by the conclusion of this essay, have explored.
We can get at what happens to Lure in two stages. First, from a beginning in which he is sure he knows exactly what is going on in his urban world of reason, we will detail a series of arguments he loses, in both the city and the country, that drive him out of the world of humans and into the putatively lower world of animals. Second we will visit Lurie in that world and see what truths he learns from his sojourn there.
The Descent
How did he get there? And what exactly does he find when he gets there? He begins the novel as a scholar interested in the work of the British Romantic poets, in particular Wordsworth and Byron. Both these men, spiritual allies of Plato and to a lesser extent of Descartes, believed that one could know about and inhabit a world exactly the opposite of the world of animals. This is evident from the fragment of Book Six of Wordsworth’s Prelude that we find Lurie teaching the day after he first has sex with Melanie. Wordsworth laments that he and his party are actually arriving at Mont Blanc, which cannot live up to the idea of Mont Blanc with which they are possessed, a much better and more perfect thing than the actual Mont Blanc. (Coetzee 21)
We also first beheld
Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved
To have a soulless image on the eye
That had usurped upon a living thought
That never more could be.
Wordsworth believes there is a higher and better world of Ideas, in the Platonic fashion, and that art, especially poetry, invokes and makes such perfect things present. “The great archetypes of the mind, pure Ideas, find themselves usurped by mere sense images” (Coetzee 22); and we will never find these ideas unless we “climb in the wake of the poets”(Coetzee 23) with an “eye half turned toward the great archetypes of the imagination we carry within us.” It is under this rubric that he conceives his initial seduction of Melanie Isaacs: he tells her (Coetzee 16) that she “ought” to spend the night with him because “a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.” Then he quotes a line: “‘From fairest creatures we desire increase, that thereby beauty’s rose might never die.’” (Shakespeare, Sonnet One) Because of this – that beauty is a rose that must never die and has an existence in and of itself, Melanie “does not own herself. Beauty does not own itself.” (Coetzee 16) Lurie says that with respect to this beauty he “is in the grip of something”, namely “Beauty’s rose”. (Coetzee 18)
This attitude extends to how Lurie sees his attraction to Melanie. When we love someone we want to get beyond their physical appearance: “do you truly wish to see the beloved in the cold clarity of the visual apparatus? It may be in your best interest to throw a veil over the gaze, so as to keep her alive in her archetypal, goddesslike form.” (Coetzee 22)
Wordsworth seeking the perfect archetype of the mountain, Lurie seeking a perfect archetypal beauty that does not belong to those who bear it – both attest to the reality of a realm of pure ideas, in which the Platonic soul and/or Cartesian cogito can know pure archetypes. Lurie begins Coetzee believing in such ideas and in such souls.
He is not, however a pure Platonist because he is also a sensualist and a seducer. So he teaches that, however seductive pure ideas might be, “We cannot live our daily lives in the realm of pure ideas, cocooned from sense experience. The question is not, how can we keep the imagination pure, protected from the onslaughts of reality? The question has to be, can we find a way for the two to coexist?” (Coetzee, 22)
Lurie argues that Wordsworth means, in line 599 of the Prelude, to strike such a balance between ideal and actual by privileging the “sense image”, which is halfway between “the pure idea, wreathed in clouds” and “the visual image burned on the retina.” (Coetzee, 22) But even this “sense image” appears to privilege the Platonic idea: these images are to be “kept as fleeting as possible, as a means toward stirring or activating the idea that lies buried more deeply…” (Coetzee, 22), because “sense organs reach the limit of their powers, their light begins to go out”. And at the moment such a limit is reached, “that light leaps up one last time, giving us a glimpse of the invisible.” What matters, ultimately, to Lurie, Wordsworth and Plato, is the invisible, the category that Plato associates with the soul.
The Double Expulsion
Lurie’s journey to the edges of knowing and being is not something he either wills or expects. He begins the novel in a state of self-involved self-deception, full of epistemological and ontological hubris. He is exactly the sort of man who thinks he knows, whom Plato used so often as Socrates’ foil in his dialogues. Lurie’s downfall, his disgrace, has two overlapping trajectories. First, Lurie is progressively excluded from the urban environment, in which he occupies a position of power as a professor of Communications, because he sees the world differently from everyone around him. Second, he is equally excluded from the country society that centers on his daughter Lucy’s farm, for not knowing what is going on and for not understanding what he sees. His epistemological obtuseness leads, in both cases, to ontological exile.
Expulsion from the City
The first argument Lurie loses in the city is with his weekly “escort”, Soraya. He believes that he has “solved” the problem of sex through his assignations with this woman. The falsity of his assumptions about “Soraya” become clear when he sees her in public, as her day-to-day self, with her children, and begins to imagine himself with her as part of a couple. He assumes that he has seen into the invisible depths of their relationship, that he knows how Soraya sees him. (Coetzee, 2)
Because he takes pleasure in her, an affection has grown up in him for
her. To some degree, he believes, this affection is reciprocated. They have
been lucky, the two of them: he to have found her, she to have found him.
When he sees her in public he assumes that he has the further right to “see” even more. “In Soraya’s arms he becomes, fleetingly, their father: foster-father, step-father, shadow-father.” (Coetzee 6) Lurie feels Soraya transforming herself “into just another woman and him into just another client.” (Coetzee 7) His mistake is not to understand that he was always “just another client”. Lurie has crafted an idealized Soraya and an idealized relationship. This becomes clear when he hires a private investigator to get her telephone number and calls her. Soraya reacts with anger: “’I don’t know who you are’, she says. ‘You are harassing me in my own house. I demand you will never phone me here again, never.” (Coetzee 9-10)
Lurie completely missed what was going on – he did not know something he could easily have known. Second, Soraya denies that she even knows who Lurie is. What this means is that since she was using a false name – she was an interchangeable “Soraya” – he has no idea who she is and conversely, she has no idea who he is. Whatever she “knew” about him was circumscribed by the client-prostitute relationship in which neither party is bound to tell truth, because telling the truth is not what the relationship is about. Lurie should have known that a woman using a false name would not reciprocate affection or feel anything at all toward him.
This rebuff to his idealizing tendency seems to have little effect on Lurie. He never seems to understand that he was mistaken about Soraya, and he moves quickly to a sordid, exploitive connection with a departmental secretary and then to his disastrous “affair” with Melanie Isaacs, a relationship as inherently false as that with “Soraya.”
The second argument that Lurie loses in the city is with his ex-wife, Rosalind. He has dinner with her after the charges are leveled. Lurie’s template for interpreting the affair is radically different from Rosalind’s. She tells him that he is “too old to be meddling with other people’s children” (Coetzee 45) He “should have known”; what he did was “stupid” and “disgraceful” ” (Coetzee 45), and he must “expect no sympathy, … no mercy, in this day and age.” (Coetzee 44) Rosalind’s tone is minatory. He has done something indefensible, “meddling” with “children” when he is himself a parent. It is almost as if he is child molester, and Rosalind assures him that absolutely no one will be on his side.
Lurie tries to introduce the question of love, to change the “language game” from child molestation to the erotic. He tells Rosalind: “You haven’t asked whether I love her. Aren’t you supposed to ask that?” Rosalind quickly responds with deflating irony. “Very well. Are you in love with the young woman who is dragging your name through the mud?” (Coetzee 45). Rosalind obviously never considers the possibility that love had anything to do with the matter, just as Soraya never thought for a minute that there was any sort of affection between her and Lurie.
Lurie begins his meeting with the University’s Committee of Inquiry with a similar disjunction between the way he wants to talk about the event and the way they do. The Committee is interested in whether he accepts their members. Lurie wants to raise what he calls a “philosophical objection”. The Committee chair responds that this cannot be done because the Committee is required address only the “legal sense” of the events under discussion. (Coetzee 47) Mathabane, the chair, adds that this is an “inquiry” rather than a “trial”, whatever that might mean.
Lurie, however, following his now lengthening list of misunderstandings, promptly pleads guilty to both the charges, as if this were a trial. But since this is an inquiry, an attempt to find out the truth, not decide guilt or innocence, the Committee is not satisfied with Lurie’s admission and wants him to do something different, namely to “state his position.” (Coetzee 49) His only position is that he is guilty, which requires no further statement. But again the Committee is not satisfied because, to put the matter crudely, Lurie is speaking the wrong way. They want to know: “Guilty of what?”
Lurie’s answer, that he is guilty of everything that “Ms Isaacs avers”, and of falsifying the records, is exactly what they do not want to hear. He is warned that his approach, which seems to the Committee like “talking in circles”, is “not prudent” but “quixotic.” He is not playing the correct language game. Even if the chair of the Committee stated that the inquiry was strictly about legal matters, and Lurie has stuck to strictly legal responses, the Committee wants something more, and the more they want begins to come clear when a female member of the group, asks “ ‘Would you be prepared to undergo counseling?’ ” (Coetzee 49)
Counseling as a suggestion emerges, for Lurie, from “another world, another universe of discourse.”(Coetzee 58) The disjunction comes because the Committee chooses to understand Lurie’s inner life differently than Lurie does. Even though the chair claims that what goes on in Lurie’s “soul” “is dark to us” (Coetzee 58) and that they do not want repentance but a public statement that appears to be repentant, the suggestion about counseling belies this claim. The Committee seems to see Lurie’s inner self, his “soul”, as a territory open to “counseling”, that is inspection and correction. And in calling for such surveillance and discipline they are also implying that his motive – what he calls Eros – was not an autonomous force but some version of mental illness. They are in fact rejecting the idea that souls can be visited by anything but their own urges and delusions, and arguing that love is a purely psychological and political event rather than a form of possession.
Against this “idea of the world” Lurie is defending two ideas: first the primacy and irreducibility of the invisible soul, and second the legitimacy of the invisible motive force, Eros. In both cases Lurie is basing his argument on the real existence of two important invisibles, Eros and the soul. That the invisible Eros, not Eros as biological instinct but Eros as metaphysical force, can move the invisible soul is the nub of his argument. But Eros has no currency in the paradigm used by the Committee, just as what Lurie considers a religious category, repentance, should, in his opinion, have no currency in the supposedly purely secular, legal guidelines under which the Committee operates.
But the Committee can reject the “language game” in which his confession is couched just as they are implicitly rejecting the “language game” of Romantic poetry in which such figures as Eros are considered real, and just as Rosalind rejected the language game of love, and Soraya of genuine affection. The Committee can impose its logically mixed, even inconsistent language game on Lurie. They can reject “philosophical objections” in favor of purely legal procedural standards on one hand, then call for extra-legal “repentance” and public statements accepting moral blame, and a call for the therapeutic intervention of counseling, on the other, because their templates for discourse are currently hegemonic and Lurie’s are “quixotic” and “subtly mocking”, styles of thinking and talking from which the Committee tries to save Lurie.
Lurie loses this third argument decisively and loses his job. He also, by this act, loses his place in the city. He goes to visit his daughter on her small farm in the East Cape. When Lurie shows up at his daughter’s farm, the discussion is about his status. She says, “What if we don’t call it a visit? What if we call it a refuge? Would you accept refuge on an indefinite basis?”
(Coetzee 65)
Lurie wants to act as if his appearance at the farm is voluntary, part of a possible “long ramble.” If Lurie is a refugee then his status has been reduced. So the question is: who knows his current status, and how is it to be established? Lucy feels that she knows more about his status than he does. He contests her description. The farm is not a refuge. He says that he is not (66) “a fugitive.”
Lucy counters by saying that Rosalind, her mother, told her that he had been let go under adverse circumstances. Lurie offers his account. He says that he brought it all on himself – which contests the idea that he is either a refugee, an outcast, someone whom the authorities have condemned. He says he sealed his own fate because he would not accept what he describes as “Re-education. Reformation of the character. The code word was counseling.” (Coetzee 65)
He associates such a proposal with “Mao’s China. Recantation, self-criticism, public apology.”(Coetzee 66) He rejects this because it belittles his claims about Eros and reduces his invisible inner self to a therapeutic site that needs correction. Such a redescription makes the invisible completely visible, something Lurie consistently resists.
He makes this position clear when he says,
“These are puritanical times. Private life is public business. Prurience is respectable, prurience and sentiment. They wanted a spectacle: breast-beating, remorse, tears if possible. A TV show, in fact. I wouldn’t oblige.” (Disgrace 66) In these times, the soul is turned inside out. What was once invisible is now made visible, becomes a spectacle, and thereby becomes a “show”, essentially inauthentic in its visibility.
But we have seen how poorly Lurie’s platonizing “explanations” work: they are seen as ‘quixotic’, “stupid”, “disgraceful. Lurie’s language games have been repudiated. They are not wrong. They just don’t mean anything in the current world of discourse. Lucy tells him “You shouldn’t be so unbending. It isn’t heroic.” (Coetzee 67) She does not respond directly to his claims. She neither agrees not disagrees, but thinks that whatever his position it is not worth maintaining at the cost of turning him into someone who requires refuge. Lurie has lost this argument because Lucy has not accepted his definition of who he is and of what happened to him. She might or might not agree with the Committee’s description of the world, but she definitely does not agree with his.
Lurie has a second dinner with his ex-wife when he returns to Cape Town, and it reinforces his exchange with Lucy. Rosalind has heard more about the “trial”, and tells him that she hears that he did not “perform” well. He responds that it was not a question of performing well but of defending a principle, which he says was “ ‘Freedom of speech. Freedom to remain silent.’” What he means by this “principle” is that he wanted the freedom to speak in the diction he chose, rather than in the language of confession and counseling. And he wanted the right to remain silent about his motives, about the dark recesses of his soul.
But Rosalind, like Lucy, is skeptical. Where Lucy saw him as too unbending, Rosalind thinks that Lurie is a “great self-deceiver”, that he might just have “ ‘gotten caught with (his) pants down’” (Coetzee 188), and that even if he was fighting for a principle, that principle was “too abstruse”, so that the Committee believed he was merely “obfuscating.” (Coetzee 189) Again, the way Lurie talked and the way the Committee, and perhaps even his ex-wife, was hearing, did not match. The Committee did not think Lurie was wrong. They did not know what he was talking about.
His exclusion from his former urban environment is settled once for all by two incidents that happen during his brief stay in Cape Town, incidents that reaffirm the gap that exists between him and the world he once inhabited. First, he goes to the super market and runs into Elaine Winter, chair of his “onetime department”. She tells him that a contract instructor in “applied language studies” has replaced him. (Coetzee 179) Lurie thinks to himself, “So much for the poets, so much for the dead masters.” His way of speaking and thinking have been displaced by a language technocrat who belongs to the same culture as that which wants him to go into counseling.
His former colleague never asks how he is doing. She waves goodbye after she has made her purchases, a symbolic kiss-off from a world that has ejected him.
He receives an analogous sendoff when he attends the play in which Melanie has a part. Ryan, Melanie’s boyfriend, drives Lurie out of the theater by throwing spitballs at him and hissing. Outside, Ryan tells him to “’Stay with your own kind’.” And, “’Find yourself another life, prof. Believe me!’” (Coetzee 194)
These events in Cape Town make it clear that both the University and Melanie’s world have rejected him, his language, and his manner of life. He is not their “kind”; he is being waved off. The question is, then – who are his kind, and what other life should he find?
These questions are especially pressing because the events just noted come, in the novel, after the attack on Lucy’s farm and after his relationship with his daughter has deteriorated. He does not have a “kind” to be with, at least not a human kind, and the other life he tried to develop seems not to be working out.
Expulsion From the Country Refuge
After he retreats to the country life settles down. Lurie helps Petrus around the farm, accompanies Lucy to the market and assists Bev Shaw at the clinic. But then there is the attack and Lurie’s position in his country retreat begins to erode under the pressure of a new series of lost arguments, this time with his daughter, Petrus and Pollux. In the interests of space we will only review the arguments with his daughter.
The attack is a violent physical argument in itself that both Lucy and Lurie lose. Lurie has, in a literal, profound sense, been dispossessed of his refuge. But the dispossession is not complete until after a series of arguments with his daughter. These arise from the fact that he and Lucy, like he and the Committee, use different “language games” to understand the world.
The first argument breaks out when Lucy and Lurie are preparing to speak to the police. Lucy tells him that there will be two stories – hers and his. She wants to control her narrative, intends not to tell the police that she was raped. Just as Rosalind and the Committee invalidated Lurie’s story of his relationship with Melanie Isaacs, so Lucy invalidates whatever story Lurie was planning to tell about her rape. “You tell what happened to you, I tell what happened to me.” (Coetzee 99) Lurie disagrees: “’You’re making a mistake.’” (Coetzee 99). Lucy does not offer a counter-argument but simply says, “’No I’m not.’” To which Lurie’s only reply is “‘My child, my child!’” (Coetzee 99). Lurie’s version of the world is once more rejected.
The next argument Lurie loses occurs after Lucy has told her story and visited her doctor. Lurie speaks as if the doctor can solve Lucy’s problems “ ‘And is he taking care of all eventualities?’” Lucy answers: “’She,’ she says. ‘She, not he. No, how can she? How can a doctor take care of eventualities? Have some sense!’” (Coetzee 105) They are clearly speaking from different universes of discourse. Lurie has chosen to take a clinical approach, as if being raped were a purely medical matter. Lucy understands that it is much more, and responds in kind. Lurie is now accused of not having any “sense”, by which Lucy means common sense or sensitivity. Once more Lurie is being rebuffed, told he does not get it, doesn’t understand.
The next part of the exchange confirms this. Lucy says that she is going back to the farm and resuming her life. Here Lurie tries to apply the “sensible” descriptor, and fails. He tells his daughter to “be sensible”, that going back is too dangerous, not a “good idea.” (Coetzee105) She responds that going back is not an idea at all, but what she is about to do. “’I’m not going back for the sake of an idea.’” (Coetzee 105) Not only does Lurie lack “sense”, but he is again accused of being an out-of-touch idealist, “quixotic”: there is no guiding rational principle in Lucy’s return. She is “just going back.” And this is the “sensible” thing to do. It is again, in her eyes, Lurie who lacks sense.
Lurie, in this as in his arguments with the Committee and with Rosalind, tries to defend an idea and gets rebuffed.
The next contretemps between Lucy and Lurie happens shortly thereafter as they sit down to dinner in her home. Lurie again contests her decision to maintain two stories about the incident. “’Lucy, my dearest, why don’t you want to tell? It was a crime. You are an innocent party.’” (Coetzee 111) Lurie is again invoking “ideas” – “innocence”, “crime”, that Lucy might not apply to the situation. He also assumes that Lucy is not telling because she feels ashamed of what happened and is somehow blaming herself for it. “Shame” is another “idea.” He then imagines, in a bit of narcissistic folly, that Lucy’s reason for remaining silent has to do with him. She is perhaps trying to make a point to him, namely that women suffer at men’s hands. Lucy rejects this “explanation,” as well as Lurie’s reference to crime and innocence.
She tells him the real reason for her silence. She says that “’as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. At another time, in another place, it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, at this time, it is not. It is my business, mine alone.’” (Coetzee 112) We cannot help but think back to what Lurie said earlier about private life becoming public business. Lucy invokes what appears to be the same principle that made Lurie “unbending” to her, “quixotic” to the Committee and “shameful” to Rosalind.
Lurie responds that his daughter cannot deceive herself into thinking that keeping the rape now will protect her in future. The reason it will not is that “vengeance”, which is an abstraction, “ ‘is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets.’ ” (Coetzee 112) Lucy completely rejects this: she says that she is not keeping the rape quiet “ ‘just to save my skin’ ”. She is keeping quiet so she can stay as part of the new system. And she is also saying that she rejects Lurie’s explanation that the rapists are driven by some abstract thing called “vengeance” that has its own characteristics that operate almost independently of those who feel vengeful. What moves the rapists is an economy of protection that has nothing to do with vengeance.
Lurie counters with another possible explanation, another hypothesis: if Lucy is not trying to buy safety through meekness, then she must be trying to pay off some imagined debt. “ ‘Do you hope to expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?’” (Coetzee 112)
Again Lucy rebuffs him. She rejects “guilt” and “salvation” as explanatory concepts in this circumstance. She says that they, like vengeance are “abstractions”, and abstractions are not something that appropriately describe Lucy’s acts. “ ‘I don’t act in terms of abstraction.’” (Coetzee 112) She is not seeking salvation; she does not want to expiate past crimes with her silence; she does not just want to save her own skin. But she never says what she does intend by the silence, only that Lurie’s “abstractions” are off the point, perhaps not “sensible”. Again he is rebuffed, told that his explanations for things are just wrong.
They clash again when one of the attackers, the boy Pollux, appears at Petrus’ party. Lurie rushes back to Lucy’s house to telephone the police but Lucy stops him, and tells him not do it because it will ruin Petrus’ party. “ ‘Be sensible.’” she says, not for the first time. Lucy tells him not to blame Petrus. He rounds on her:
He is astonished. ‘For God’s sake, why isn’t it Petrus’ fault? It was he
who brought these men in the first place. And now he has the effrontery
to invite them back. Why should I be sensible? Really, Lucy, from
beginning to end I fail to understand.
(Coetzee 133)
What Lurie “fails to understand” – again we have a reference to knowledge – is why Lucy did not report the rape and why she does not want to admit that her neighbor had a hand in planning it.
They clash again when Lurie senses that Lucy is not doing well after the attack. He thinks she should leave the site of so many “ugly memories”. Referring to the original decision to tell separate stories, Lurie tells his daughter that she can “ ‘start a new chapter elsewhere’” (Coetzee 155) Lurie is proposing that Lucy craft a new story, because the old story that excluded the rape is not working. Lurie thinks this is the right solution:
“ ‘Can’t we talk rationally?’” (Coetzee 155)
Lucy counters that Lurie is again missing what is going on. “ ‘ There are things you just don’t understand. To begin with, you don’t understand what happened to me that day. You think you understand, but you don’t. Because you can’t.’” (Coetzee 157) This echoes something Bev Shaw told him. He told Bev that he knew what Lucy was going through because “ ‘I was there.’” Bev answers: “ ‘But you weren’t there, David. She told me. You weren’t.’” (Coetzee 140)
Lurie is baffled both times. He knows that he was there. The question is, what does “there” mean in this context? For Lurie being “there” meant he was in the home, powerless, when the rape took place. Being there means being present and unable to save his daughter from violation. For Lucy, however, being there means having experienced, felt and understood, in an unmediated way, what it to be attacked by three men who “ ‘do rape’”. (Coetzee 158), and who have “marked” her, as a dog might mark its territory.
But not only did Lucy experience their hate directly. She has learned something from being treated as part of the rapists’ “territory”:
‘But isn’t there another way of looking at it, David? What if that is the
price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at
it. Perhaps that is the way I should look at it, too. They see me as
owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors. Why
should I be able to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they
tell themselves.
(Coetzee 158)
Lurie objects that Lucy’s earlier characterization of the attack as an act of hatred was more apt. “ ‘Trust your feelings. You said you felt only hate from them.’” (Coetzee 158) Lucy agrees that there was hate but argues that hate, men and sex go together in ways that make the rapists indistinguishable from all other men. If that is true then the “tax collector” theory can still stand: they act in hatred, as all men do, and are beside, tax collectors, markers of territory. One explanation does not exclude the other.
Exasperated by his inability to get through to her, Lurie writes a letter that tells Lucy that she is wrong in wanting to stay. He suggests that Lucy is doing what she is doing because she wants to “humble (her) self before history”(Coetzee 160), but he says that this is the “wrong” road and that if she continues she will be “strip(ped) of all honour.”
Lurie assumes that Lucy feels some obligation to the abstraction, ‘History’, whatever that means. Perhaps he is referring to the record of apartheid and is arguing that Lucy mistakenly feels that she owes her rapists something because of past injustices. But Lucy has never suggested such a thing, and nothing in her disquisitions about tax collecting or male hatred indicate such a stance. As to honor, she has never mentioned “honor”, another abstraction like “principle” or “history”. These terms may be, as Rosalind suggests, “too abstruse”. They do not seem to have much to do with Lucy’s decisions, and so Lurie gets it wrong again,
Lucy’s response makes this clear. She writes: “You have not been listening to me. I am not the person you know. “ This must mean that the person, Lucy, whom David sees and with whom he talks and eats and walks, is not the “real” Lucy. She is, in reality, “a dead person”. The one who feels the hate from men and who thinks that being marked is the price she has to pay to remain where she is, is also “dead”.
Lucy accuses him of blindness. “’You did not see this.’” And “’It is as if you have deliberately chosen to sit in a corner where the rays of the sun do not shine. I think of you as one of the three chimpanzees, the one with paws over his eyes.’” (Coetzee 161) So, just when Lurie thought he understood, once more he is proven wrong. Bev Shaw was right. He was not there and does not understand. And as he loses this “argument” he is pushed further out of the world in which he thought he might find asylum.
The arguments with Lucy are not however finished. Lucy tells Lurie that she is pregnant and that she is going to have the baby. She accuses Lurie of always making his daughter a minor character in the story of his life. She has her own life; she is the subject of her own narrative, to which Lurie must now adapt. Lurie accepts the new reality but, shattered by his daughter’s new and enduring connection to the world dominated by Petrus and the rapists, he “hid(es) his face in his hands, he heaves and heaves and finally cries.” (Coetzee 199)
When Pollux the “jackal boy” returns, Lurie again pleads with Lucy to leave and go to visit her mother in Holland. With one her rapists on the scene, the situation, in which Pollux could be the father of Lucy’s child, has become in Lurie’s view “sordid” and “ridiculous”. But again Lucy does not listen and Lurie becomes ever more marginal.
The penultimate argument between Lurie and Lucy centers on Lucy’s decision to offer Petrus an “alliance”, a deal whereby Lucy will give him her land in return for his protection. She will “creep in under his wing” as some sort of wife, and he will be the father of Lucy’s child. Lurie thinks that the proposal is “preposterous”, a form of “blackmail” by whose invidious terms Lucy is allowed to stay in her house unmolested in return for giving up her farm and with it her dreams of an independent rural life. The “dogs and daffodils” with which Lurie first found her will all be gone.
Lucy, as we have come to expect, rejects Lurie’s criticism. Again she tells him “ ‘I don’t believe you get the point, David.’” (Coetzee 203) She knows that the situation is humiliating but she takes the humiliation differently. She takes the end of her hopes as a possible starting point. “ ‘Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level, with nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity. Like a dog.’” (Coetzee 205)
In this speech Lucy is surrendering it to Petrus, to the way things currently are. This becomes clear in the final argument, when Lurie attacks Pollux with the bulldog and Lucy comes to the boy’s defense. At this point Lurie must be asked to leave.
‘David, we can’t go on like this. Everything was peaceful again,
until you came back. I must have peace around me. I am prepared
to do anything, make any sacrifice, for the sake of peace.’
‘And I am part of what you are prepared to sacrifice?’
‘I didn’t say it, you said it.’
‘Then I’ll pack my bags.’
(Coetzee 208)
He becomes a scapegoat for a second time because his way of seeing the world, and the way his world is seen by those who control it, are so deeply at odds. He is, once more, exiled from the realm of culture and full being and relegated, finally, to the place he has always already belonged: the world of animals against which both Plato and Descartes have warned us.

Lurie and the Animals

Coetzee is filled with figurative animal references – more than forty in all , but it is the literal meetings with animals that make a difference in giving him a new “home” on the margins of the world.
When he and Lucy go to the market to sell produce he meets Bev Shaw, who the Animal Welfare League clinic that she and her husband sustain as best they can because the new government has lost interest in the plight of animals.
They go to Bev’s home and Lurie is put off by Bev’s lack of attention to her appearance, by the lack of taste in the way the house is furnished, and by the back yard. He is also offended by the odors in the clinic itself – urine and mange and cleaning fluid. (Coetzee 72) After they leave Lucy asks him what he thought of Bev and her clinic. Lurie is impressed by her dedication but he has reservations. “ ‘I don’t want to be rude. It’s a subculture of its own.’” (Coetzee 73)
I’m sorry, my child, I just find it hard to whip up an interest in the subject. … to me,
animal welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so
cheerful and well-intentioned and after a while you wish to go off and do some
raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat. (Coetzee 73)
Lurie does not take people like Bev, and by extension his daughter, terribly seriously. He sees them as earnest do-gooders whose focus on animal welfare is one of those admirable but unimportant things that only a certain kind of (failed) people would spend time on. “ He has nothing against … animal lovers. The world would no doubt be a worse place without them.” (Coetzee 72)
Lucy understands this perfectly. She says, “ ‘You think I ought to involve myself in more important things. I ought to be doing something better with my life.’” (Coetzee 74) Lucy knows that Lurie believes in what she calls a “higher life”, which is better than the life she and Bev are leading. Such a life would include things like “ ‘painting still lifes or teaching (one)self Russian.’ ” (Coetzee 74) And it might include Platonic ideas and higher forms of Eros.
Lucy counters with her own vision of the world. She does not believe that there is a higher life: “There is no higher life. This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals. That’s the example I try to follow. To share some of our human privilege with the beast.” (Coetzee 74) Lurie half agrees with her, but makes some significant exceptions. “ ‘I agree, this is the only life there is. As for animals, by all means let’s be kind to them. But let us not lose perspective. We are of a different order of creation from the animals. Not higher, necessarily, but different.’” (Coetzee 74)
Lurie demonstrates a certain inconsistency. On one hand he agrees with Lucy that “this is the only life there is”, with the implication that “There is no higher life”. Despite this admission Lurie argues that animals and humans are of different “orders of creation”. But the notion of “orders of creation” presupposes a hierarchy. In any event Lurie asserts a difference between humans and animals that seems to echo his earlier Platonizing view of the world. Under this view kindness to animals is an act of optional generosity rather than a moral obligation to an equal.
Despite his differences with Bev about the place of animals in the scheme of things Lurie agrees to volunteer at the clinic. At first Lurie is skeptical. “ ‘It sounds suspiciously like community service. It sounds like someone trying to make up for past misdeeds’” (Coetzee 76) Lurie does not want to do anything that hints that he has moral obligation to animals, and he does not want to do anything that suggests he has done something wrong for which he must compensate. There is no justice involved, only generosity. He agrees to help with the stipulation “ ‘only as long as I do not have to become a better person’”
(Coetzee 75)
Before he begins this work Lurie has an interaction with Lucy’s dogs that hints of what is to come. The younger ones recognize him; he has become part of their world. But the old abandoned bulldog, Katy, pays him no attention. (Coetzee 62) She, like Lurie, has found a refuge with Lucy. Lurie crawls into the pen with her, “stretches out on the bare concrete”, under the blue sky, and “His limbs relax.” (Coetzee, Coetzee 78) He sleeps stretched out next to the abandoned dog, where his daughter finds him. She asks whether he is making friends and Lurie replies that this is not easy, as “ ‘Poor old Katy, she’s in mourning.’” (Coetzee 78)
What the nap represents is an incipient connection in which Lurie and the animals share the space of being, take up the same bodily location and coexist in the same space and time. When Lucy said that she did not believe in higher things and that she believed that we share this single life with the animals she might have had something like this in mind and this is precisely what Lurie rejects in words, even though it is what he finds himself doing, in practice. He has, perhaps, despite his protestations to the contrary --we are of a different order of creation – implicitly accepted Lucy’s egalitarian metaphysic; accepted it at least on the level of how he lives in his body.
But Lurie’s view of the world still differs from his daughter’s, if in unexpected ways. He mentions having a soul, and Lucy says “ ‘I’m not sure that I have a soul. I wouldn’t know a soul if I saw one.’” (Coetzee 79) Lurie, who has agreed with Lucy that this world is all there is, that there are no “higher things”, puzzlingly tells her that she is wrong, that “ ‘You are a soul. We are all souls. We are souls before we are born.’” (Coetzee 79) He seems to be suggesting that even in a world in which there are no higher things, no fundamental divisions between higher and lower, there are also “souls”, which pre-exist their appearance in bodies. He appears to be a dualist but we are not sure which sort, especially since he later tells Mr. Isaacs that he does not believe in God. (Coetzee171)
We are also not sure what he means when he says “We are all souls.” Does he mean all humans are souls, or is the mourning Katy, for example, included? If the latter, then Lurie has changed his metaphysics. Perhaps he is not thinking about consistency, or is still in process of working things out and, as Ian Hacking has perspicaciously remarked in this connection, things aren’t always so consistent when one is working out one’s views.
When Lurie goes to the clinic he helps Bev hold down a dog with an abscessed tooth. She has no anesthetics or antibiotics. She is not a veterinarian but a volunteer and can only relieve what pain she can, with her small skills and with her thoughts. She tells Lurie, “ ‘Think comforting thoughts, think strong thoughts. They can smell what you are thinking.’” (Coetzee 81). Lurie thinks this last idea is ridiculous but Bev does tell him that he is “ ‘a good presence. I sense that you like animals.’” (Coetzee 81) Bev lives in and by her body; she lives in a world in which thoughts have an odor, where thoughts have a physical presence and impact, where one’s bodily presence matters, where beings feel each other, in touch and smell and sound. She inhabits her body as if she is not of a different order of creation than the animals whose bodies she treats. Lurie, despite his skepticism, has already foreshadowed this embodied metaphysic in his nap with Katy, and might, whether he knows it or not, have been enacting it as he held the terrified dog. Lurie might be moving into a different sort of being-in-the-world, to a large extent unrelated to the world of Platonic ideals, or to the worlds of argument in which his ideas were consistently rejected.
Right after the dog with the abscessed tooth has been treated, a woman brings in a grand old goat that has been savaged by dogs. His scrotum is badly infected. The wound has been left too long and there is nothing Bev can do to save him. But as she treats the goat, Bev does something extraordinary.
She kneels down beside the goat, nuzzles his throat, stroking the throat upward
with her own hair. The goat trembles but is still. She motions to the woman to
let go of the horns. The woman obeys. The goat does not stir. She is whisper-
ing. ‘What do you say, my friend? What do you say? Is it enough? The goat
stands stock still, as if hypnotized. Bev continues to stroke him with her
head. (Coetzee 83)
Bev tells the woman that she can euthanize the animal. “ ‘He will let me do that for him.’” And she adds, “ ‘I will help him through, that’s all.’” (Coetzee 83) The woman does not want him put down; the local people have their own way of slaughtering their animals. Bev describes him in human terms: “‘What a pity! Such a good old fellow, so brave and straight and confident!’” Bev sees the goat as a subject, an agent who has a right to control his fate, and she “consulted” with him by stroking his hair with hers and by speaking with him.
Lurie, surprisingly, finds himself trying to comfort Bev by offering a theory, one made up or realized on the spot, about what goats do and do not know. This is a goat epistemology proposed as consolation, but is also perhaps a disquisition on the goat soul. He says:
‘Perhaps he understands more than you guess. Perhaps he has already been
through it. Born with foreknowledge, so to speak. This is Africa, after all.
There have been goats here since the beginning of time. They don’t have
to be told what steel is for, and fire. They know how death comes to a goat.
(Coetzee 84)
What is Lurie saying here? Is he claiming that goats have a kind of Platonic innate knowledge, an embodied Form of the Goat, always already imbedded in their consciousness, so that they know when death approaches as the slave boy in Meno knows that the sides of a square twice the area of another cannot be assessed by doubling the sides of the square? Lurie does not seem to be advancing a biological theory about genetic coding, but says that goats know how they are going to die and also therefore know what it means to live as a goat, to have a goat body and a goat consciousness.
Bev half believes him but disagrees about one point. Even if the old goat knew how he was to die she does not think that knowing is sufficient. For Bev dying, in whatever species is an essentially social act. Rejecting Heidegger’s characterization of death as Dasein’s “ownmost non-relational possibility” without ever having read or heard of Heidegger , Bev asserts “ ‘I don’t think we are ready to die, any of us, without being escorted.’” (Coetzee 84)
For Lurie, the penny drops. He begins to understand what Bev is doing. Bev cannot be a healer because she has neither the skill nor the means to heal. Bev, like St. Hubert, offers a last refuge to the hunted and harried. “Beverly Shaw is not a veterinarian but a priestess, full of New Age mumbo-jumbo trying, absurdly, to lighten the load of Africa’s suffering beasts.” (Coetzee 84) There is something “absurd” about Bev’s mission, in trying to give these animals their own deaths. But Lurie has just contributed to what he calls “New Age mumbo-jumbo” with his theory about goat foreknowledge. Perhaps this is all to be read in the register of the darkly comic. But at the same time Lurie is taking part in this absurd activity on both a practical and a theoretical level, and he might be learning something in the process.
The next stage in Lurie’s education is when he watches the dogs in Bev’s clinic eat. He sees that despite their hunger and their numbers, they allow each other access to the food without snarling and biting. “ ‘They are very egalitarian, aren’t they?’” (Coetzee 85) Their problem, says Bev, is not a lack of morals but that there are too many of them. Dogs do not understand, and as Bev says we cannot tell them, that there are too many dogs, “ ‘by our standards.’” If dogs had their way they would do exactly as we have done – “ ‘They would just multiply and multiply if they had their way, until they fill the earth.’” (Coetzee 85)
Lurie listens and as he listens he is allowing a dog to smell his face. He is getting involved on a bodily level, squatting by the cage, letting the dogs touch him, feeling them, falling for and into Bev’s “New Age mumbo-jumbo”.
The attack reinforces Lurie’s awakening new awareness with respect to animals. I will not attend to the details of the attack except to note two things. First, there is the execution of the dogs. The killings are related in detail, almost as if the animals were humans who were being murdered
Lurie, who has been “bled dry” by the attack, and is “without hopes, without desires, indifferent to the future”, like “an old man, tired to the bone.” (Coetzee 107) still takes care of the dead dogs by burying them. (Coetzee 110) He treats the dead animals as if they warranted an almost-human burial.
Second, Lucy goes to the dogs and holds them, calling them “’My darlings, my darlings’”, as if they were human lovers. It is as if, although they disagree about almost everything else, Lucy and Lurie are coming closer on the question of what animals mean.
Lurie begins to notice animals in a new way. When Petrus is planning to throw a party to celebrate the completion of his new house (and Lucy’s impending capitulation?) he purchases two sheep to be slaughtered for the event. Petrus stakes them out in the sun with no grass for forage and no water. Lurie moves them to a better location. “Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crunched and fed to the poultry.” (Coetzee 124) And then he says something interesting about the sheep’s’ “soul”, new evidence that his earlier claims about the difference between people and animals is shifting. “Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding.”
When Petrus moves the sheep back their shadeless spot Lurie ponders how he can help them. He has no way to take care of sheep. He is a refugee himself living on a half-ruined farm. And even f he bought these sheep Petrus would use the money to replace them with others who would be slaughtered. Lurie understands that he cannot be an animal savior because animals are “too menny”. So, if he is going to be implicated in the lives of animals it cannot be as a savior. He will have to redefine his connection, which he does later in his roles as undertaker, psychopomp and harijan.
But this incident takes him one step closer to a new relationship with animals. Even Lucy argues that there is nothing to be done about the sheep. This is Africa, after all, and the country besides. This is how people do things. This might be a suggestion of an attitude that allows Lucy to make an “alliance” with Petrus later, but is one that Lurie, unbending as he is, cannot adopt. Even though he tells his daughter, “’I haven’t changed my ideas’”, in the sense that he “ ‘still do (es) n’t believe that animals have properly individual lives.’”(Coetzee 126), at the same time, “ ‘ in this case I am disturbed. I can’t say why.’ “
His disturbance has two sources, both of which belie his claim that he still doesn’t believe that animals have individual lives. First, in ways he does not understand, “a bond seems to have come into existence between himself and the two Persians.” (Coetzee 126) that makes him regard their treatment as “indifference, hardheartedness.” He purports not to feel anything for the sheep. “The bond is not one of affection.” (He will later admit affection for the crippled young dog, and say that he “loves” the dogs he kills.) And, denying that individual animals matter, he says, “It is not even a bond with these two in particular, whom he could not pick out from a whole mob in a field.” (Coetzee 126)
But he undercuts his denial of animal individuality, and his claim that he has no affection for these animals when he approaches the animals and they edge away. He says that he is “looking for a sign” – of recognition? Of shared being? And when he does not get that sign – the animals do shy away – he remembers Bev Shaw with the goat, “nuzzling (him), stroking him, comforting him, entering into his life.” (Coetzee 126) (Italics mine). This certainly seems like an instance of recognizing the very individuality he has denied and of valuing affection for such individuality. Even though he might not be able to pick out the two Persians in a field, they might still, like the old goat, possess “souls”, individual identities.
This theme of animal individuality reasserts itself when Lurie thinks about the people who bring dogs in to be euthanized. These people want something like what the Nazis wanted in the Holocaust, a Lösung, or “solution”, a quick disappearance of the animal/person, “leaving no residue, no aftertaste”. (Coetzee 142) Is this way of dealing with animals a refusal, a willing, not to see their individuality, as the Nazis treatment of the Jews was a similar refusal? And are both, equally, sins?
It to precisely these “excess” dogs, for whom people want a “final solution”, that Bev Shaw as priestess/ escort, gives her attention as if each individual dog had an importance, as if each one were a subject, had a soul. “To each, in what will be its last minutes, Bev gives her attention, stroking it, talking to it, easing its passage.” (Coetzee 142) Lurie thinks that he impedes this process because he is filled with shame at his role, and the dogs can “smell (his) thoughts”, precisely the idea he had earlier ridiculed. He still lacks that “communion with animals” that Bev has. It is “Some trick he does not have.” (Coetzee 126)
But as he participates in the killings they become more of his daily life. “His whole being is gripped by what happens in the theater.” (Coetzee 143) And, despite his claim that he does not know “whether by nature he is cruel or kind” and is, in a moral sense, “simply nothing” (Coetzee 143), the pain gets worse. He lacks what he calls “the gift of hardness”, and because of this he finally breaks down
“The more killings he assists at, the more jittery he gets. One Sunday evening,
driving home, he actually has to stop at the roadside to recover himself. Tears flow
down his face that he cannot stop; his hands shake.” (Coetzee 143)
This, from the man who said “Which among them get to live, which get to die, is not . . . worth agonizing over.” (Coetzee 127)
He begins to become convinced, falling into the “New Age mumbo-jumbo” he once rejected, that the dogs sense (know?) what is about to happen to them. “The dogs in the yard smell what is going on inside. They flatten their ears, they droop their tails as if they feel the disgrace of dying.” Once inside, none will look at the needle, “which they somehow know is going to harm them terribly.” (Coetzee 143) The dogs know. Again, as when Lucy called the dead dogs “darling” and when Bev Shaw speaks softly to the goat, or to dogs about to die, Lurie is beginning to speak about the animals as if they were not on a different level of being than the humans. Each dog, each goat, knows; perhaps each, as Lurie earlier conjectured, also has foreknowledge, a sense in their embodied consciousness of what it means to be a dog or a goat, and what that means with respect to how they will die. Each dog, perhaps, has the soul that Lurie earlier said that we all have, even though he does not believe in God and believes, with Lucy, that this world is all the world there is.
Though he is powerless to save the dogs, Lurie can attend to the dogs when they have died. Lurie describes how he deals with the dead dogs. “The business of killing is over for the day, the black bags are piled at the door, each with a body and a soul inside.” (Coetzee 161) Each dead dog is both body and soul. Has he extended his beliefs about souls to animals? Has he moved beyond his claim that that do not have “properly individual lives”?
This is certainly indicated by his behavior and especially by his explanations for it. Lurie will not leave the bodies of the dogs with “the weekend’s scourings” of hospital waste. The dogs’ bodies are not waste, but bodies, and Lurie “is not prepared to inflict such dishonour upon them.” (Coetzee 144) And, when he left them before he noted that rigor mortis had set in, making the bodies difficult to fit into the incinerator. “The hospital workers would break the legs so that the bags would fit more easily into the incinerator and the burning would be more complete.” (Coetzee 145)
He asks himself why he has taken on the job. It is partly to help Bev Shaw, but it cannot, he says, be for the dogs, which are dead by the time he helps them. He does it mostly “for himself. For his idea of a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.” (Coetzee 146) What world is this? We immediately get images of crematoria and death camps and genocidal massacres and mass graves – instances in which men did use shovels to beat corpses into shape for “processing”. We also get images of industrial plants that “process” chicken and steer and pig corpses, of animal control centers that “process” unwanted cats and dogs. Once we remove qualifying adjectives from “corpses”, and allow “processing” its full range of meanings, we cannot help but be reminded of Coetzee’s other work on such issues, that is Elizabeth Costello’s two part lecture, The Lives of Animals and the claims Elizabeth makes about the moral equivalence of abattoirs and death camps.
I do not think it is either accurate or useful to push this reminder further. Lurie is by no means an animal advocate with a developed theory. He is the nameless old man, the “mad old man” (Coetzee 212) who brings the dogs in bags to the incinerator. He himself is not clear about what he is doing or even confident that it is not “daft” or “wrongheaded”. But there is some principle involved, and I do not think it excessive to call it a form of Kantian deontology. Lurie seems to believe that it is just wrong to show such disrespect to the dead, and he does not want to live in a world where such practices go unchallenged. He has an “idea of the world”, of the whole world, in which there ought to be a rule: do not use shovels to beat corpses into convenient shapes, or, do not dishonor the corpses of the dead. The importance of the rule becomes clear when he goes back to Cape Town and misses his assigned job: “From Monday on the dogs released from life within the walls of the clinic will be tossed into the fire unmarked, unmourned. For that betrayal, will he ever be forgiven?” (Coetzee 178)
Whom is he betraying? I think that Lurie is groping toward a new principle – namely that the animals he helps to kill do have individual identities, are subjects, and are therefore worthy of honor, and as deserving of post-mortem respect as any dead human. He believes that every dog – and by extension every sheep, every goat – should be “marked” and “mourned” in its passing, should be, that is, escorted across the line between life and death as Bev escorts her animals, and then honored after its death by someone like himself – a nameless, mad old psychopomp who lacks the “trick” of communing with animals while they are alive.
Mourning suggests, as Derrida makes clear, that the one who died is worthy of remembering, that he or she had a life history, an irreplaceable “take” on things, a way it was like to be her, whose loss is worth grieving. Lurie could not possibly have known all the dead dogs intimately. He could not have experienced each of their irreducible “takes” on the world, and if he had he would certainly not have understood them in the way the dog-subject did. But he could mourn the fact that he knew that each dog did have such a take on things, and that each such subjectivity is worth honoring in and of itself, in a non-instrumental, Kantian way. Kant’s description of the subject is of an ens a se, an end-in-itself, worthy to be mourned simply because it was.
Additional evidence that animals possess a nameless and unmarked subjectivity is that, in addition to being able to suffer and to know that they suffer, they love. “Of the dogs in the holding pens, there is one he has come to feel a particular fondness for. No visitor has shown an interest in adopting it. Its period of grace is almost over; soon it will have to submit to the needle.” (Coetzee 215) About this dog with its withered haunches that is wanted even less than the other dogs, “he is sensible 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.” (Coetzee 215) The dog loves him.
Sometimes Lurie lets this young dog out of the pen. It plays and sleeps at his feet, although he will not name it. He even considers allowing the dog to “sing” alongside Teresa, whom he definitely loves, in his opera. They are, after all, equals in their sorrow: “Would he dare do that: bring a dog into the piece, allow it to loose its own lament to the heavens between the strophes of lovelorn Teresa’s” (Coetzee 215) The dog in fact never contributes to the opera because Lurie allows it to go under the needle. But he almost included it, included it in principle, because it had a lament as individualized and as legitimate as the human Teresa’s.
This might be the key. Other animals suffer and know it, and this dog unconditionally but accidentally loves Lurie. It also likes music and might want to sing a lament in his opera. These are particular “personal” facts about this young crippled dog for which Lurie has developed an affection. But Lurie is not a savior. He is an undertaker and psychopomp. A harijan, one who handles and guides the dead, not the living. In honoring the dead he is asserting that each of them, individually, had love to give unconditionally and accidentally, that each might or might not have liked music, and might or might not have wanted to, or been capable of, adding a lament to the opera. Lurie’s “idea of the world” includes honoring all of these anonymous, powerless, dogs that were each capable of suffering, loving and singing. His pledge, which he can no longer betray, is to all of them, and for this reason he cannot select one as more important or valuable than the rest. A man who has lived by selecting women for his private enjoyment has moved beyond all selection and become a guardian of all the dead, which excludes him from selecting any one of them to live.
This is how Lurie ends up – like a dog, and among the dogs. He begins to live, more or less, at the clinic. The yard that he described with such distaste and condescension when he first saw it has become his preferred residence. “In the bare compound behind the building he makes a nest of sorts, with a table and an old armchair from the Shaws and a beach umbrella to keep off the worst of the sun.” (Coetzee 211) This is the yard that he once described as “ an apple tree dropping worm-ridden food, rampant weeds, an area fenced with galvanized iron sheets, wooden pallets, old tires.” (Coetzee 72) Lurie now has nothing but his gas stove and his canned food, and of course his banjo. He lives on the very edge of the human world. He has become a true dog-man. Living by their cages, in his own “nest”, he has become more than a psychopomp. He feeds them and cleans out their pens. He talks with the animals. He is in their world, as lacking in dignity and almost as lacking in property as they are. Like a dog, he sits quietly, dozing in the heat. He has left the world of men, entered the world of dogs, and found there a new vision of the soul – temporal, embodied, unnamed – and real.
And, in finding this new understanding the soul, Lurie discovers that he has one, too.
Sunday has come again. He and Bev Shaw are engaged in another
One of their sessions of Lösung. One by one he brings in the cats,
then the dogs: the old, the blind, the halt, the crippled, the maimed,
but also the young, the sound – all those whose time has come.
(Coetzee 218)
Lurie works silently alongside Bev, putting the bodies in the plastic bags. He “has learned by now, from her, to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing”. Lurie’s obligation is to focus all his attention on the individual animal that is dying. He is their escort, their guide, not their owner or master. This is where Lurie expends his emotion: in paying attention to each animal as it dies, Lurie knows that he is “giving it what he no longer has difficulty in calling its proper name: love.” (Coetzee 219)
Cast out of the city, out of the country, as a scapegoat who cannot ever win an argument, Lurie has “descended” to the world of the animals and found, if not salvation, then a way to love and certainly, a new way to belong.