On One Who Doesn't Speak

"The human body is the best picture of the human soul."⁶¹ This remark of Wittgenstein's is no tautology, at least insofar as human soul is to express spirit, and spirit is primarily that which pertains to the form and character of a human world, to the human form of life. Is it ultimately that because the human being is a speaking being, the human body can be so expressive of the human form of life in language? Or can an animal that has no capacity to speak provide a picture of the human soul, of the human world? In fables such as those of Aesop or La Fontaine, the simplicity of the demeanor and behavior of the animal speaks to our intuitions about (human) character. The animal allegorizes character as ruled by a predominant trait (courage, cunning, avarice). Character as a nonpsychological unity of spirit is not the inner life but, rather, is manifest in how surroundings are characteristically illuminated by the person of character.

But can the real and mute presence of the animal nonallegorically reveal the human world? Robert Bresson's Au hasard, Balthazar follows stages in the life of a country donkey, used, abused, and also loved, primarily by Marie, who, as a child, introduces the newborn animal into the circle of the speaking animals, by naming him.⁶² As Balthazar is transferred from owner to owner, Marie's undoing parallels his maltreatment. But there is nothing here approaching the horrific suffering of animals, say, in the food industry. For sure Balthazar is prodded, whipped, and beaten to take on various labors, but apart from initial resistance, he altogether passively lends himself to all the uses humans put him, including that of a "smart ass" (âne savant) in the circus. What comes closest to deliberate cruelty toward the donkey is a prank of Gerard, more a village scoundrel than a true villain. Even though the death of Balthazar follows his being dragged up a hill to smuggle goods across the border, it is not maltreatment that kills him. Left by the smugglers who run away from the police, he is hit by a stray bullet, accidentally. The camera is steady on Balthazar's head as firing goes on around him, and when hit, he is merely startled by the impact and starts walking steadily, as he did so many times after being whipped, with no expression of pain, fear, or distress.

The film is so sad, so disheartening, but not because of our empathy to the mute suffering of Balthazar the donkey. Though he plays a central role in eliciting this sadness, he is not its immediate object. Nor do we feel sadness because we identify with Marie's attachment to Balthazar (as is the case in so many films about the friendship of a child and an animal). The deep sadness of the film has to do with how the donkey, a constant presence, opens for us human surroundings as inherently disordered. As human doings and undoings gravitate around him, the mere presence of the passive, all-accepting Balthazar unhinges our sense of how the world revolves. In a paradigmatic scene Gerard chases Marie around Balthazar so that the donkey is both an obstacle defending Marie and an element of the developing game. Marie finally half falls, half throws herself down, gives up, and submits to the villain's sexual advances. Rather than a figure of innocence in that cursed world, as her name might suggest, she is one of innocence destined to be compromised. The ambiguity of the inevitable rules this scene. The rhyming fit of contingency to the name of the donkey, Au hasard, Balthazar, reveals the human world as a field of fate. Contingency is not a sign of providence but the vehicle of the inexorable ambiguity of fate (fate as ambiguity) in human life.

On the occasion of the film's appearance, Godard remarked that one is given in it "the world in an hour and a half." Detachment rather than imaginative identification or empathy is essential to the projection of a world in film...