Giving Up Driepoot. Or: How to Achieve Grace through Dog Euthanasia

Professor David Lurie sleeps with a dog, named Katy. David had just left Cape Town, where he lost his job for sleeping with a student and being unrepentant for it. The next time he sleeps with another, it is with Katy. "He stretches out beside her on the bare concrete … His limbs relax" (Disgrace, 78). David is never represented as a sentimentalist, or one to spiritualize animals – but he displays an affinity for canines throughout Disgrace, a novel by J.M. Coetzee. Yet, while David visits his daughter in rural Salem, he helps a local woman euthanize and dispose of unwanted dogs. An unlikely, and certainly unsavory, task. If David is truly touched by dogs, why choose to work in arranging their deaths? This question is highlighted when, in the kennel, David meets one of the most important dogs in his life: Driepoot . The two feel a profound connection, though it is never identified as love. When the time comes for Driepoot to be euthanized, David is given a choice: let him live for one more week (at least), or put him to death immediately. David chooses immediate death; it is a puzzling decision, considering the lack of connection he finds in other aspects of life. Why does David not give special treatment to Driepoot? I argue that David has no choice but to euthanize Driepoot, in order to find grace in a post-apartheid South Africa.


Love in Death

David’s conviction that love is shown in giving administering a caring death is an unusual one. Killing rarely translates into love. How can one be sure that David feels a kind death to be an act of love? As a professor of the romantic poets, “love” is a word that no doubt frequents his thoughts, and certainly not one he uses lightly. Derek Attridge suggests “love is used for the very different relation David has to the dogs about to be put to death” (117). This claim is supported by David’s assertion that, when euthanizing an animal, he gives it “what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name: love” (Disgrace, 219). As Louis Tremaine points out,
“this is the only love that David is described as feeling or expressing … The love that streams from David to the dogs comes only at these moments of concentrated attention, in the very act itself of attention to beings whose selves are disappearing before his eyes” (608).

It is an interesting attitude; one that David is seemingly convinced of, and academics are largely in agreement on (Tremaine, 608; Attridge, 117; Attwell, 867). Oddly enough, having had an affair with a student, having been through terrible times with his daughter, David can only express love for others when helping them die as comfortably as possible. Initially uncomfortable with such a definition (i.e., “love”), David went through intensive self-reflection to come to such a conclusion (143-6). By the time he agrees to “give [Driepoot] up” (220), it seems quite uncontestable that David feels a kind death to be an expression of love.


A Failure of Love

It is not enough to simply find passages within Disgrace and articles from the academic community that prove David expresses love when assisting in animals’ deaths. The reasons for such emotion require examination. The most obvious reading of the loving executions he administers is in contrast with the three black men who came to David’s daughter’s house, raping the daughter and beating David. The attackers brutally shoot the dogs of the household (Disgrace, 95-6). David holds the men in disgust, and clearly finds their actions contemptible (114-5; 132-3). Attridge claims that David never “make[s] a connection between his forcing himself on Melanie [a student] … and the sexual attack on his daughter” (116). But a closer reading shows that David cannot escape that the rape of Lucy (his daughter) could be compared to his near-rape of a student, as he asks Lucy if she is “trying to remind [him] of what women undergo at the hands of men” (Disgrace, 111). The attackers and David share two experiences: rape (or near-rape), and the killing of dogs. By contrasting their heartless killings with love-filled euthanizations, David psychologically distances himself from the attackers.

While such an explanation has an appealing symmetry to it, there is a problem in its logic. If David were to truly distance himself from the attackers, why not save Driepoot? David could continue to have a positive relationship with the dog. This is not to discredit the previous explanation entirely: in post-Apartheid South Africa, it is important to recognize different expectations for races. When black men brutally kill dogs, their actions can be rationalized because they are “in a country where dogs are bred to snarl at the mere smell of a black man” (Disgrace, 110). But white men are not allowed such luxury. Nowhere is this clearer than in Coetzee’s statement that “at the heart of the unfreedom of the hereditary masters of South Africa is a failure of love. To be blunt: their love is not enough” (Doubling the Point, 97). To live in a post-Apartheid South Africa, David has to learn to not fail at love. Further, “in refusing to single out the special dog, David is accepting … the claims of an infinite number of other creatures with whom he has no special connection” (Barnard, 222). This makes sense with Coetzee’s quotation. David’s expression of love, through a kind death, cannot be selective if he is to escape the “unfreedom” of the traditional white caricature. His love needs to be universal in the South African context.


Rebirth

Linda Seidel asserts that "David sacrifices the dog who resembles him," making "the final event in the story a kind of spiritual suicide on the part of a man who feels unmanned" (par. 15). While it is not hard to claim David is “unmanned”, as “his protection of [his daughter] is without value and his advice to her is ignored” (Attridge, 110), the idea that Driepoot’s death is “a kind of spiritual suicide” is contentious. Jane Poyner, along similar lines, thinks David is sacrificing “the emotional investment he has made [in Driepoot, thereby paying] penance for his ‘crime’” (74). Both interpret David to be punishing himself by allowing Driepoot’s death, using the words “sacrifices” and “penance” to illustrate this self-punishment. They see David as someone who must give up something, either because he has been “unmanned”, or because he has committed a “crime”.

Seidel and Poyner make convincing arguments; it is impossible to deny that David’s decision to euthanize Driepoot goes against his selfish wants. However, while Driepoot’s death is a tremendous sacrifice on David’s part, it does not necessarily translate into self-punishment. Attridge advises that “it would be a misreading of [David’s] behavior to suggest that he is taking on an existence of suffering and service as expiation for his sin” (116). Rita Barnard writes that Driepoot’s death indicates an “ethos that relies on something other than a settling of accounts and the paying of a price” (222). David never shows an impulse to repent. He does, however, express delight in ideas of starting over. David begins thinking that “there may be things to learn,” and wondering if it is “too late to educate the eye” (Disgrace, 218). Nevertheless, while Lucy is left “with nothing” (205), David maintains that she “may be able to bend to the tempest; [but] he cannot, not with honour” (209). David’s honour keeps him from “the new”, and from connecting with Lucy. In allowing Driepoot’s euthanization, David makes a decision to completely start over, putting aside honour (here displayed in his selfish desire to save Driepoot). David reaches his ultimate rebirth point when he agrees to euthanize Driepoot, proving part of Seidel’s and Poyner’s arguments correct.


Conclusion

An in-depth look at David’s final decision shows it to be the door to grace in a post-apartheid South Africa. David Attwell declares that, “if grace is available at all, it will lie in simple acts of love that will enable the world's creatures to die graciously” (Attwell, 867). Grace , while not the technical opposite of disgrace , is what David hopes for. He does not even consider the possibility of public honour, but “favour” and “goodwill” (“Grace”, 3) are things he dares to hope for. Grace is also defined as when someone “has the ~ to do something, [he] realizes that it is right and proper, and do it” (“Grace”, 5). This, too, is part of what David hopes to accomplish. He knows that it is only through doing the “right and proper” thing, that he can find a niche for himself in a changing national landscape.

As proven above, kind euthanasia is an expression of love, and indiscriminate love is the only way David can truly be in grace with the country. To get to the point where David is able to sincerely and indiscriminately express this love, he has to start at the beginning again. In letting Driepoot die, David does the “right and proper thing,” the only thing that could allow him grace in this new landscape. If he were to retain any selfishness or honour, he would not be able to let his love manifest itself in the same way for every creature he encounters. Although this ending seems completely devastating, Coetzee allows the reader some grace. He makes Disgrace’s final line ambiguous: David says, “Yes, I am giving him up” (220). What is “up” for Driepoot? Upwards generally indicates positivity. Maybe from David’s final act, his first act of grace, things can only get better.


Works Cited

Attridge, Derek. "Age of Bronze, State of Grace: Music and Dogs in Coetzee's "Disgrace"" NOVEL: a Forum on Fiction 34 (2000): 98-121. JSTOR. UBC Library. 30 Mar. 2008 .

Attwell, David. "Review: Coetzee and Post-Apartheid South Africa." Journal of Southern African Studies 27 (2001): 865-867. JSTOR. UBC Library. 30 Mar. 2008 .

Barnard, Rita. "J. M. Coetzee's "Disgrace" and the South African Pastoral." Contemporary Literature, 44 (2003): 199-224. JSTOR. UBC Library. 30 Mar. 2008 .

Coetzee, J M. Disgrace. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1999.

Coetzee, J.M. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992.

"Grace." Def. 3, 5. Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English. 3rd ed. 1974.

Tremaine, Louis. "The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the Work of J. M. Coetzee." Contemporary Literature 44 (2003): 587-612. JSTOR. UBC Library. 30 Mar. 2008 .