Confronting the Dogs of War: Violence and Caregiving in Ian McEwan's Black Dogs and David Grossman's To the End of the Land

Unrelenting conflict raises acute ethical questions regarding the appropriate response and how to balance between competing and incompatible values. What is our responsibility towards our own safety and self-preservation? What is our responsibility to others? How can empathy with a rival co-exist with our need for self-defense? These questions have been raised in many forums, for instance in peace committees and conflict management studies.¹ I wish to add literature's voice to the debate, as I believe that it has a unique contribution to make. On the one hand, literature provides a safe distance—a fictional sealed territory—for reflection; on the other, it makes manifest the individual experience with exceptional lucidity. Literary structure can thus provide a broad context for thinking about the historical evolution of deep-rooted clashes, while still preserving the immediacy of traumatic experience. In being both in the moment and outside, it can provide a perspective that is less readily available within other forms, and so suggest creative ways for addressing ethical questions.

In this essay, I explore the intertextual links between two novels that engage in the ethical dilemmas raised by traumatic conflicts: Ian McEwan's Black Dogs (1992) and David Grossman's To the End of the Land (2008). Though the two novels are separated by language, culture, and time, both—interestingly enough—explore the nature of conflict through the ancient metaphor of the "dogs of war"²: each is punctuated by a scene describing a violent struggle with wild dogs—a scene that crystalizes the ethical questions driving the story. In both, the battle with the wild dogs serves as a key symbol for how confrontations unfold, pointing to an inherent human capacity for violence and cruelty. This cruelty seeps into all areas of human life, be it the public sphere of politics or the private context of family. Yet comparing the parallel scenes of the dogs' attack reveals essential differences in how the two novels conceptualize conflict and its resolution.

In Black Dogs, the encounter with the dogs is the key episode that gives the novel its name: June, the narrator's mother-in-law, is attacked by a pair of enormous dogs while walking the mountain paths of southern France during her honeymoon. This episode is to define her life, reverberating into the future. In Grossman's mammoth novel, the encounter with the dogs is more marginal, but nonetheless significant. The protagonists, Ora and Avram, are threatened by a pack of wild dogs while hiking the Israeli Galilee. In this case, Ora manages to calm the dogs, thus diffusing the conflict. Even this brief overview points to the significant difference between the two scenes. If in McEwan's novel, the recurring image of the black dogs comes to symbolize the impossibility of overcoming violence and uprooting the evil that "lives in us all" (172), in To the End of the Land, the episode of the dogs opens a possibility of hope.

I propose reading this difference as Grossman's reflection on, and revision of, McEwan's position in Black Dogs, analyzing it in light of the differing historical backdrops of the two novels. To the End of the Land does not refer explicitly to Black Dogs. Nevertheless, the depiction of the dogs in Grossman's novel recalls several key aspects of the parallel scene in Black Dogs, suggesting a purposeful, meaningful dialogue. That the two writers are aware of each other's work is clear—they have met at numerous occasions and sat on literary panels together.³ Even if the intertextuality is subliminal rather than intentional, a comparative reading of the scenes clarifies and strengthens each author's vision of conflict and its aftermath. The juxtaposition highlights the ethical subtext of To the End of the Land even as it clarifies McEwan's vision of post-war Europe in Black Dogs.

In what follows, I argue that Black Dogs must be understood in light of its historical backdrop of absolutist political ideologies, specifically [End...