It’s a fact, I still think of her, even now in this fever … in the first place I can’t tear myself away from anything, a memory, a person, so how would I tear myself away from a dog? … I’m a virtuoso of fidelity … fidelity and responsibility … responsible for everything … a disease … anti-ungrateful … the world is good to you! … animals are innocent, even when they run wild like Bessy … in a pack they shoot them …
I really loved her with her crazy escapades, I wouldn’t have parted with her for all the gold in the world … … oh, she didn’t complain, but I could tell … strength all gone … she slept beside my bed … one morning she wanted to go out … I wanted to lay her down in the straw … right after daybreak … she didn’t like the place I put her … she wanted a different place … on the cold side of the house, on the pebbles … she lay down very prettily … she began to rattle … that was the end … they’d told me, I didn’t believe it … but it was true … she was pointed in the direction of her memory … the place she had come from, the North, Denmark, her muzzle turned toward the north … a faithful dog in a way, faithful to the woods of her escapades, Korsör up there … faithful too to the awful life … she didn’t care for the woods of Meudon … she died with two, three little rattles … oh, very discreet … practically no complaining … and in a beautiful position, as though in mid-leap … but on her side, felled, finished … her nose toward the forests of the chase, up there where she came from, where she’d suffered … God knows! …
Oh, I’ve seen plenty of death agonies … here … there … everywhere … but none by far so beautiful, so discreet … so faithful … the trouble with men’s death agonies is the song and dance … a man is always on the stage…even the simplest of them …*
We can marvel at the power and beauty of this text. Or rather the beauty that comes from the incredible power of the words, which take on the cri de cœur and the tears of a man going to pieces when faced with the death of his dog, a death that is at its most naked, its rawest, its truest. It was the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being who, in Encounter, reminded me of and made me return to this magnificent passage from Castle to Castle. Bessy dies at Meudon from cancer, missing the North, Denmark, where ‘for two, three hours … this was one of her escapades … wild in the animal world … woods, meadows, rabbits, deer, ducks …’ It’s the finest of all deaths: the death agony of the dog avoids all the song and dance that, necessarily and inevitably, accompanies man up until he dies … Ceremony, staging, spectacle, spiel, bling, a whole layer of falseness, which prevents us from seeing what it is that’s essential and ends up destroying it …
Man tells lies even through the catastrophes that strew the earth with the dead in their thousands. For example, at the very time that an irremediable flaw of technology was revealed in the nuclear crisis at Fukushima, a crisis causing unspeakable suffering that in some respects is worse than death, man could not stop his lying. Faced with unbearable images and appalling risks, which at the least demand repentance and honesty on the part of those responsible for the disaster, we saw that man chose to carry on living with the lies, the humbug …
We know that in France, as in Japan, an inconceivable number of dogs and cats are abandoned and euthanised every year. We also know that every day, in many countries, the world over, millions of animals raised on hormones are industrially slaughtered on a massive scale for the greater good. This unheard-of violence is undoubtedly the end result of the theory of animal-machines as it became established in the classical age. The extreme in terms of landscape, the endpoint presented to us by this radical disjunction between men and animals, is perhaps that of the contaminated zones of Fukushima where dogs, cats, cows, pigs, hens and other animals are dying in a state of intolerable abandonment and dereliction. It is indubitably one of the many, many consequences of the right claimed by modern man ‘radically to separate humanity from animality’ to use Lévi-Strauss’s expression, while at the same time blinding ourselves to our primary nature as living beings.
While listening to Alain Finkielkraut’s interview with Élisabeth de Fontenay for Répliques about her brilliant book The Silence of Animals, I remember hearing a magnificent passage by Paul Claudel, who refers to the death of all the animals in the world today:
A cow is now a living laboratory, the pig is a product selected to provide a quantity of bacon conforming to the standard. The hen, adventurous and wandering, is incarcerated. Are they yet animals, creatures of God, brothers and sisters of man, signifiers of divine wisdom that we must treat with respect? What have we done to these poor servants of ours? Man has cruelly shown them the door. There are no longer any ties between them and us. And as for those that he has kept, he has taken their soul from them. They are machines, he has made the beast lower than a beast. And this is the fifth plague: all the animals are dead, not a one is still with man.
I often look at photos of animals taken at Fukushima. Some of them show extraordinarily acutely the suffering, the distress even, of a dog or a horse … This is the same distress, the same sadness I thought I saw a couple of times in the heart-rending look Mélodie gave me when I left her on her own for the whole day.
I look for images of dogs in paintings. Mostly they are not particularly interesting. I don’t like Oudry’s dogs. They’re painted as if they’re automatons. I prefer Jacopo Bassano’s Two Hunting Dogs. They’re tied to a tree stump, and what they look is sad. The philosopher of The Silence of Animals refers to the great sadness in the expression of the horse that bears the knight in Knight, Death and the Devil by Albrecht Dürer. But I find his Guard Dog’s expression more moving.
Among all the images of dogs that I have looked at there is one that reaches out and clutches at me and won’t let me go: Goya’s painting The Dog, which is part of the famous ‘Black Paintings’ of the Quinta del Sordo. What exactly can we see in it? Almost nothing. All there is, in the lower part of the picture, is the tiny head of a dog who is buried beneath some darkish-coloured matter: sand or earth. The rest is just emptiness against an ochre background permeated by a kind of wash of diluted ink, tinged in places with a faint yellowish glimmer. To this I should really add that from the upper part of the painting, at the top right, there descends a dark, greenish, ghostly shadow like the disturbing symptom of an indefinable menace. The eye of the dog—wide open—oh, how it reminds me of Mélodie’s!—is cast upwards. But since the pictorial space is bare, we do not know what it is looking at. The world is as if voided of its living matter. Claudel’s phrase comes back to me: ‘All the animals are dead’. Goya’s dog is perhaps the last animal in the process of disappearing, of falling into nothingness. Man has already disappeared from the horizon. Has he deserted? Is he dead? Whatever the answer, in this desert, in this land scape of desolation that is the very negation of a landscape, there is no trace of man. And anyway, what man could live in such a void? What man would want to stay there? Can I speak, like Yves Bonnefoy, of ‘an impulse, if only the mere hint of it, of compassion’? But, in this horror, in this denuded space that has now turned to dust, where nothing seems to breathe, isn’t the emotion that seizes us rather one of anger? Even if—with that extraordinary eye—the painter, by according an attention both intense and delicate to this touchingly fragile animal, succeeds in making us share his own compassion …
In the extreme abstractness of its composition The Dog reveals a strange power, asking questions of all of those, wherever they may be, who look upon the at-once devastated and devastating landscape of post–11 March Fukushima, where, silently, the death agony of the animals seems to denounce the scandalous complicity of men mired in their own lies.
For me the afterlife of Mélodie will last a long time, a very long time.
* From Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Castle to Castle, trans. Ralph Manheim.
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