‘Like a Dog’: Rituals of Animal Degradation in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Abu Ghraib Prison

The revelation of prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib during the spring and summer of 2004 confronted U.S. Americans with the devastating repercussions of the Bush administration’s foreign policy after the attacks of 11 September 2001. The photographs from Abu Ghraib presented critical thinkers with a number of moral and aesthetic problems. They forced us to ask how one could reconcile the ideology of spreading democracy with the practices of rendition, extrajudicial incarceration, and torture. The photographs also made us ponder how suffering and death caused by torture could be discussed in non-voyeuristic ways. The collective witnessing in 2011 of the tenth anniversary of ‘9/11,’ including the many efforts to memorialize the attacks by framing them within narratives of U.S. American exceptionalism, demonstrated the continued pertinence of these issues.

This essay employs J. M. Coetzee’s Booker prize-winning 1999 novel, Disgrace, as an intertext to ‘read’ photos of prisoner abuse and torture from Abu Ghraib.¹ Working through the novel’s treatment of animals and figurations of animality demonstrates how humans displace human forms of violence onto non-human animals in order to exculpate themselves from responsibility. The representation of Disgrace’s David Lurie’s and other characters’ recourse to animal metaphors and metonyms to justify human cruelty illustrates the type of thinking that lay at the basis of treating prisoners like beasts in Abu Ghraib prison. A recognition of this pattern will also demonstrate how forms of gendered violence—in short, the feminization of the prisoners—relate to practices of empire and colonization. Reading two Abu Ghraib photographs through Coetzee’s novel will lead me to a discussion of how, through its focalizer’s realization of his fallibility and attendant collusion with territorial attitudes towards women and their bodies, the narrative works to bring him to an awkward form of secularized grace. This involves his increasing awareness of the importance of not relying on abstractions to justify immoral actions. Finally, this essay suggests that Coetzee’s fictional narrative offers us a way to respond to our “national shame” (Coetzee, Diary 39) regarding prisoner abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

My reading of the novel departs from historicist interpretations of Coetzee’s work such as David Attwell’s which argue that his fictions, if self-reflexively, are deeply engaged with their specifically South African context. Adopting Attwell’s thesis about the fictions’ situatedness and simultaneous larger scope of address, I suggest that while Disgrace ostensibly reflects on the historical moment of post-apartheid South Africa, it also implicitly “project[s itself] beyond [its] situation” (Attwell, J. M. Coetzee 113). Disgrace offers a fictional sketch for how to work through our complicity in “the shame of Abu Ghraib” (Limon) towards a possible form of narrative healing; this enables one to re-read the photographs without participating in vicarious voyeurism. Deeply engaged in interrogating the process by which colonialist practices repeat themselves (Castillo; Attwell, J. M. Coetzee 14; Jolly, Colonization 111), Coetzee’s fictions may be applied to the last gasps of empire that characterize the United States’ abrogation of its identified enemies’ rights.

Since Dusklands (1974), Coetzee’s work has investigated the narrative possibilities of representing violence in a manner that refuses to fetishize the victim and her or his pain (Jolly, Colonization). This issue was focused on non-fictionally in Coetzee’s essay “Into the Dark Chamber” (1986) as well as fictionally, most recently in Elizabeth Costello’s reflections on the evils of representing torture in The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg. Reflecting on the author’s (former) national context, Coetzee’s fictions narrate the painful status of being an unwilling participant in a system of systematized oppression. One thinks here, in particular, of Magda, Elizabeth Curran, Susan Barton, and the Magistrate’s interactions with the economies of violent repression that they inhabit. If Coetzee and his characters may be described as “reluctant colonizers” (Watson 1986; quoted in Jolly, Colonization 138), their status finds its equivalent in the situation of U.S. Americans like myself...