Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?

In her book Melancholia’s Dog, Alice Kuzniar asks whether the feeling of shame blurs the boundary between humans and animals in the very act of constructing it.¹ The feeling of shame, according to Freud and Lacan, is what separates humans and animals, but shame is experienced, Kuzniar suggests, at the moment we act most naturally or most “animal like”—as if to experience shame were “to feel improper or unnatural at doing something natural.”² Like shame, abjection is a state that similarly reveals our animality in the moment we most wish to distinguish ourselves from it. Shame might be regarded as the conscious (if unwilled) manifestation of the unconscious or unacknowledged state of abjection. Both abjection and shame are states of confusion or dissatisfaction about who or what the self is, who or what I am. As Julia Kristeva writes, “I experience abjection only if an Other has settled in place and stead of what will be ‘me.’”³ This Other is often conceived of as animal or as body—that which has yet to be civilized or cultured—but is really a facet of the self that I do not recognize or do not yet know. Abjection unsettles the boundaries between me and not-me or between me and my group or kin and forces me to separate myself from it, sometimes violently, in order to affirm who I am. In abjection, as Kelly Oliver explains, there is “another animal lurking behind the origins of humanity, a darker, more frightening beast, our dependence on which we disavow and abject.”⁴

Thomas Mann’s early story “Tobias Mindernickel” tells the tale of an abject man—an “odd” and “quite ridiculous” man whose appearance and clothes are the brunt of neighborhood cackles and contempt.⁵ An outcast among men, Tobias also seems unaware of what others think and greets those who laugh at him with “humble courtesies.” Indeed, it appears that he recognizes his sorry state only when he witnesses it in another. This recognition occurs first after having witnessed a young boy injure himself. He immediately approaches the boy with “words of consolation”: “Have you hurt yourself? … How miserable you look lying there … How I feel for you” (4). Following the episode with the boy, Tobias offers similar aid to a frightened dog who is being sold on the street. His relationship with the dog becomes the focus of the story.

An outsider who empathizes with those (human and nonhuman) like him, Tobias might first appear to the reader like Rousseau’s “savage man” whose “commiseration” with those who suffer is all the stronger because of his closeness to a “state of nature,” which is described also as a state lacking self-reflection. I quote Rousseau at length because the opposition he describes between the state of nature and the state of philosophy (which is a state of reflection) is part of the intellectual tradition that Mann responds to throughout his work.⁶

For Rousseau, identification with suffering comes more easily in the state of nature. As we grow up and become “human”—understood in Enlightenment terms—we lose that possibility for pity and empathy even as we gain the possibility for philosophy. Philosophy offers us ideas with which we may separate ourselves from others and even protect ourselves from (or abject) their suffering, and at the same time it allow humans to define themselves as intellectual or reasonable beings rather than as suffering and feeling ones. In Mann’s story, alternatively, the title character becomes human through empathy with a suffering animal. But the story is also a frightening parable of empathy gone wrong, of empathy with suffering that becomes so necessary for this human’s sense of self that he, himself, must inflict suffering on the animal in order to share in it and earn his humanity.⁸ Tobias is a man for whom the lack of self-love, if not of philosophy, has savage consequences.

More noble savage than gentleman, Tobias is a creature unfit for society. Although well groomed and clean, his clothes are either too tight or too short and offer no protection from the elements. Most peculiar is the quality of his gaze—like a prey animal, he “continues to glance around in fear and scurry along his way,” and, the narrator suggests, he “seems to lack that natural sovereignty of sensory perception that allows the individual to gaze out upon external phenomena” (2). On the one hand, his sorry and lonely state might be, the narrator offers, the result of life’s hardships, but on the other hand “it’s quite possible … that he’s simply unequal to the task of being a man.” Indeed, to infer from his state of “tortured submissiveness,” one would more readily believe that he is a throwback of natural selection: “nature has denied him the strength, equilibrium and spine necessary to exist with his head held upright” (3).

It is with some surprise, then, that we find that at the moment when Tobias displays that sense of natural commiseration, going out of his way to console and bandage the bloodied head of the “poor boy” who had tripped while running, he is also able for the first time to stand “firm and upright” (4). The repeated term upright (aufrecht) carries implications both of becoming human and becoming erect, the two linked by their mutual arousal from the boy’s wounded vulnerability. This human’s sublimated sexuality thus offers a different gloss on Foucault’s description of the emergence of the homosexual as “a species” at the turn of the twentieth century, not long after Darwin’s explanations for the origin of species.⁹ When Tobias buys the young dog in the marketplace a few days later, the complicated and prohibited relations between outlaw sex and species are brought into focus. One might read the story as the attempt to reject this awakened and outlaw sexuality, similar to what happens in the Poe and Maupassant stories I discuss later. But a more accurate view, I believe, is to see Tobias’s wanting to maintain the “uprightness”—his humanity or masculinity or both—he has enjoyed and recognizing that he can do so only by keeping the dog in a state of suffering and fear. The result is a story of sadomasochistic, domestic violence that is painful to read. In other terms, “Tobias Mindernickel” pits Hegel’s master/slave dialectic against a Christian ethos of pity and suffering in order to stage the process of becoming human through the struggle for recognition, played out in the volatile relations between a man and his willful dog.

Inquiring into the names given in this story reveals complicated origins and twisted significance. Tobias is the name of a young boy and dog owner in the biblical Book of Tobit. According to the version of this story based on St. Jerome, the young and pious Tobias is sent on a journey by his father to collect payment owed to the father. He is accompanied by his dog, who is represented as his faithful companion and friend—one of the only positive references to dogs in the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, the story was never admitted into the Jewish canon—perhaps another instance of a long-standing Jewish antipathy to dogs.¹⁰ In Mann’s story, Tobias nevertheless gives his dog a Hebrew name, Esau, from the Book of Genesis. The story of Jacob and Esau, like Mann’s story of Tobias and Esau, is a tale of deception and struggle for authority. Esau, Jacob’s red-headed and hairy twin brother, arrives home famished from working the fields and is talked into selling his birthright to his younger brother for a plate of red lentil stew. In Mann’s story, it is Tobias who takes advantage of his dog’s hunger, offering Esau a plate of boiled beef in exchange for giving obedience to Tobias. Esau the dog is initially receptive to this offer, responding to his name and to Tobias’s various commands. But he eventually grows tired and bored of the game, with the result that Tobias, having discovered the joy in having his commands obeyed, is seized by an “irrational” and “indignant rage” at the dog’s unwillingness to be subdued and takes to mercilessly beating him. Only at the sight of the dog’s humbled and “beseeching eyes” does his rage turn to pity and to the melancholy happiness of taking care of him. A pattern is thus set up that exposes Tobias’s dependence on the dog’s suffering for his own pity and pleasure—if not for confirming who he is and wants to be. After the beatings and the accidental but deep wound from a bread knife, Tobias finds “happy relief” in empathizing with the “poor little creature,” keeping Esau inside the house with him and speaking to him with “pitying words” that show he feels the dog’s pain. The end of the story is all too apparent to the reader, even though the narrator writes that it is so “incomprehensible and dastardly” that he can’t recount it in detail. He tells enough of the long knife wound deep in the dog’s chest to make the reader cringe in horror and sympathy with the dog, but also in a perverse sympathy or identification with Tobias, who “had laid his face down upon Esau’s body and was crying bitterly” (10).

Where, we might ask, does Mann position himself in this story that, the narrator admits, cannot be told in full? Its ending recalls another story told about Nietzsche at the end of his life, when in 1889 he is said to have flung his arms around the neck of a horse who had been beaten by a cab driver.¹¹ The Nietzsche incident, often said to mark the beginning of the philosopher’s fall into psychosis, in turn recalls a moment in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (which Nietzsche had read two years earlier) when Raskolnikov has a fateful dream in which a young boy witnesses the beating death of a horse by an enraged cart driver. Beside himself, the boy “pushed his way, shrieking through the crowd to the mare, put his arms round the dead muzzle dabbled with blood and kissed the poor eyes and mouth.”¹² In each of the stories, there is an identification between beater and beaten. In “Tobias,” the man who is beating the dog and the boy who is crying over the beaten animal body are the same person. In Dostoevsky, the positions of beater and beaten are further identified with the sympathetic onlooker through the dreamer, Raskolnikov himself. With “his whole body feeling bruised” upon waking, Raskolnikov questions if he will really take the axe and beat, not a horse or dog, but an old lady. A horse is being beaten, a dog is being beaten, a child/old lady is being beaten; in each instance there is a shifting and substitutability of positions: somebody is beaten, somebody watches, somebody beats—and that somebody is the same person.¹³

“The question is not Can they reason?, nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” wrote Jeremy Bentham in 1789 regarding the moral basis on which to ground our treatment of animals.¹⁴ But on what grounds do we identify suffering? How might our reason, as Rousseau suggested twenty-five years earlier, be a hindrance to identifying suffering in another or to moving beyond identification to acts of relieving it? The story of Jacob and Esau is the story of a calculating man whose cunning takes advantage of his ruddy, appetitive, and animalistic older brother. As Robert Alter writes regarding Jacob’s “legalistic calculation,” “Perhaps this is a quality needed to get and hold onto the birthright, but it hardly makes Jacob sympathetic and moral ambiguities will pursue him in the story.”¹⁵ Mann’s story suggests that our reason may stand in the way of kindness, that sharing suffering rather than being able to relieve it may result from a weakness in our reason, a weakness in our philosophy, as Nietzsche, too, experienced. It is reason or, as Rousseau said, “philosophy that isolates.” Philosophy may allow us to say to a suffering man or animal (although “secretly,” Rousseau says, as if our “humanity” would be otherwise against such reasoning), “Perish if you wish, I am safe.” But this statement may do less harm than the irrational and unconscious fantasies we project onto our domestic animals even as we empathize with their suffering. Mann, we know, had read Nietzsche as early as 1894 and was greatly influenced by his writing,¹⁶ but his perspective on Nietzsche’s morality was often ambivalent, perhaps like Nietzsche’s own perspective.¹⁷ Having claimed that “the suffering of others infects us, pity is an infection,”¹⁸ Nietzsche himself could be overwhelmed by pity “for the horse” or, in Roland Barthes’s description, “gone mad for pity’s sake.”¹⁹ Perhaps we must be cautionary about the morality of pity in either of its romantic manifestations, whether we think of it as that which, according to Rousseau, has been lost in society or that which, according to Nietzsche, is the sickness of the domesticated, social being. “Pity,” Nietzsche wrote, “makes suffering contagious.”²⁰

If I read “Tobias Mindernickel” as a cautionary tale about pity and empathy,²¹ I run counter to a current trend that has regarded the faculty of empathy as everything from an important historical tool to the stuff of good literature (“the sympathetic imagination”) or, more important for our purposes, as the origin and basis for an ethical relating to animal others.²² Even from the start, empathy may be a problematic concept to apply to human–animal relations if it is true, as some believe, that the object of empathy—or sympathy, which is said to share the same “moral universe”—is “humanity.”²³ In other words, empathy may be anthropocentric at its core—asking us to acknowledge a shared humanity in an animal even to the extent that such a value may, historians suggest, have become ethically suspect in the twentieth century. This problematic is one that philosophers of ethics are grappling with, wondering to what extent a cognitive form of empathy that is trained and educated to account for an animal’s different world may overcome the limitations of affect or feeling.²⁴ In an effort to avoid charges of anthropomorphism, thinkers such as Kenneth Shapiro speak of “kinesthetic empathy,” and Ralph Acampora theorizes what he calls a “transpecific conviviality … on the level of bodiment” in order to avoid constriction to “a homo-exclusive horizon.”²⁵ But even if we are able to acknowledge that we share soma with the more-than-human world, what is it that guarantees the ethical status of our somatic drives?

Before Freud developed the idea of the unconscious as a place for the animal within the human, writers such as Mann, Dostoevsky, Maupassant, and Poe were making connections between violent, irrational drives and an animal state not in terms of a metaphorical animality, but in relation to the dogs, horses, and cats who, as domesticated beings, are part of everyday life. As in “Tobias Mindernickel,” so in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Black Cat” and Guy de Maupassant’s “Fou?” (Crazy?) encounters with pets stimulate heretofore unseen and “mad” aspects of the protagonists’ own lives and thereby raise questions concerning their own “domestication,” what it serves and to what effect. Poe’s protagonist is much like Tobias in that he is initially described as both peculiar and sympathetic, his sympathy directed especially toward animals. “From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them.”²⁶ And it is that very softness that turns “perversely” against its own object of affection, bringing the narrator to commit a series of violent acts against his “own nature” and his cats.

Madness, of course, is a limitation of our ability to choose our actions and thus an affront to the notion of free will that, since Aristotle, has distinguished humans from animals. In a discussion of perversity in Poe, Stanley Cavell suggests that Poe raises the skeptics’ questions such as “Am I alive or dead?” and “Am I a human being or a monster?”²⁷ Even beyond the either/or, Poe asks: “Can I be mad and still be human?” In an attempt to answer that question in the affirmative, the narrator of “The Black Cat” destroys the creature who raises those doubts—the cat who appears more free, more sane, certainly more able to love, and thus more human than the narrator. Poe’s view on the “metaphysical suspicion” regarding existence thus flies in the face of Cavell’s moral insistence that we accept the “claim of others as the price of knowing or having one’s existence.”²⁸ Poe—or at least Poe’s narrator—asserts the denial or annihilation of the other as that price.

Maupassant’s short story “Crazy?” raises a similar problematic in which the narrator’s madness and thus “manhood” are brought into doubt by his rivalry with a horse. Here the “claims of the other” are evident both in the narrator’s lover, who no longer responds to his efforts to excite or arouse her, and in her horse, who, he realizes, has taken his place.

Empathy here inflames envy as the narrator feels himself into her excitement, only to heighten the ignominy of his absence from it and its cause. Resolving to take vengeance, he prepares himself as if he “were to fight a duel.” Rigging a trap that trips the horse and rider, he then places one of his pistols in the horse’s ear and, “like a man,” kills it.³⁰

In a final twist, Maupassant’s story recalls Poe’s in a manner that reveals the gendered violence of acting “like a man.” When Poe’s narrator attempts to kill the cat, his wife intervenes, but only to succumb to the blow of the axe. Similarly, as Maupassant’s narrator finds himself whipped by his lover for his actions, he shoots his last bullet into her stomach. The story’s final imperative, “tell me if I am crazy,” calls upon the reader’s empathy—empathy that would be felt, we must assume, only by one who knows what it is like to have one’s manhood put into doubt. In these stories, in other words, manhood is sought through the joint sacrifice of women and animals. That these pets are so-called “humanized animals” does nothing to grant them a status of exception to the sacrificial structure that, as Derrida shows, grounds human subjectivity.³¹ Carrie Rohman writes of the resonances between Derrida’s sacrificial structures and Judith Butler’s “discursive exclusion” such that becoming human is a process encoded both by the abjection of the animal (to be human is to be not-animal and, for Poe and Maupassant, not mad) and “through the cultural norm of gender.”³² The normative male subject would then come to be defined as not-woman—hence, the need to destroy the woman and her claim on the subject.

Let me return to Cavell’s conjecture regarding the price we pay for trying to know or to own our existence. In the stories discussed earlier, we saw that the cost is annihilation of the other who has claims on me, but paying this cost only succeeds in buying the stamp of madness rather than certainty. Twenty years after Mann wrote “Tobias Mindernickel,” he wrote a novella entitled Herr und Hund (Man and Dog), which would appear to illustrate an alternative pathway to knowledge of the self. In it, the narrator—a man apparently of secure means and reputation—has his world thrown into question by his dog.³³ But this story bears the mark of Cavellean comedy rather than tragedy because the narrator is “touched by” but not “done in” by others’ problems.³⁴ Man and Dog, written shortly after Mann’s political apologia “Reflections of an Unpolitical Man” and subtitled An Idyll, has been read as a retreat from politics into the pastoral world of domestic fiction.³⁵ In its intimate attention to the trials and tribulations of living with a dog—accepting him as part of the family, learning how to respond to his needs and to respect and care for him in sickness and in health—the novella should be seen rather, I would argue, as a protopolitics and examination of the intimate relations that make us who we are. To be sure, it is something of a domestic comedy in which husband and wife are replaced by human and canine (children appear in the background but have no important role) and in which, as in the “remarriage comedies” discussed by Cavell,³⁶ the man is disabused of his idea of the partnership he thought he wanted to secure. As the narrator is brought to see his inability to be a real “master” to his dog, Baushan, without compromising his status as gentleman (both master and gentleman are implied in the “Herr” of the title), he also comes to acknowledge the deep interdependence of his own and his dog’s separate but shared worlds. It is Baushan, moreover, who is the agent of this acknowledgment by revealing, for instance, in a yawn that he has, as Derrida would say, “his own point of view.”³⁷ “‘A fine master I have,’ this yawn seems to say” (249). Unlike Tobias’s one-sided dependency on Esau, the relation between the narrator and Baushan arises from and enables a “nobility” of the dog, if not of the “master”—a nobility that is not related to blood or birth.

The fact that Baushan is a male dog might invite us to read the story as an allegory of a homosexual romance or at least of alternative masculinities. Baushan, to be sure, is a creature whose expression of “carefully considered common sense” is said not to conceal (as bourgeois morality might have it), but to “affirm the masculinity of his life ethos, which his body in turn manifests physically” (222). Although the story is about a struggle between the forces of bourgeois morality and those of the untamed, “animal” body, Baushan is not only a metaphor for a healthy homoerotic gaze, but a dog whose particular dogness is fully present—a dogness whose place in society the narrator will have to evaluate. Indeed, the red-colored Baushan can be read as a stand-in for a male lover (reminding us of Gustav von Aschenbach’s redheaded alter egos in Mann’s Death in Venice) or for Esau, Tobias Mindernickel’s reddish brown game dog.³⁸ Baushan offers Mann the opportunity to make good on the representation of society’s abject relations—whether with pets or with men—that had been the site of such violence in that earlier story. More than a domestic fiction, furthermore, Man and Dog is a story of domestication, of “what domestication can be” (as Donna Haraway might say). For Mann, it is a comparison of two kinds of domestication: that of the Herr and what he may gain or lose through obedience to the laws of bourgeois society—laws he might be said to give himself—and that of the dog and what he both gains and loses through his own obedience to a master.³⁹ These domestications are not equal, to be sure, nor are the “freedoms” gained by domestication, but this overarching hierarchy should not blind us to the inequalities that weigh on both sides or to the importance for both man and dog of what they share as a couple.

Baushan, the reader learns from the start, is a very different dog than Esau. Both, moreover, are different from Perceval, the narrator’s previous family dog, leading us to question whether, as Baushan’s “master” suggests, the imprint of species weighs more than that of individual character or even experience. Unlike Esau, Baushan does not accept the metaphorical exchange of lentils for birthright and refuses his first meal, preferring to escape from his new owners and find his way back to his original home. Indeed, mastery on the part of the unnamed narrator cannot be bought; it must be earned through attention or what might even be called “attunement” to Baushan’s particularity. Vicki Hearne writes of the importance of “reading” a dog rather than inferring temperament or behavior from some characteristic such as breed. Baushan, we are told, is a German short-haired pointer, but “if one goes by the book, Baushan isn’t really a pointer at all” (220). To read him—which is to say, to know him—one must ignore those classifications of birth, breeding, and convention and acknowledge that which, according to the narrator, defies logic as well. “Both the hunter and the game dog predominate in Baushan, and this, if you ask me, qualifies him as a pointer, even if he doesn’t owe his existence to some act of snobbish incest. That may well be the gist of the otherwise so confusing, logically disjointed words I address to him while I pat his shoulder” (222).

“It is the willingness to obey that confers the right to command,” writes Hearne,⁴⁰ and in Baushan’s case obedience is offered only to commands that respect his own “nature” or “character.” Thus, Baushan refuses to perform mere tricks or to overcome obstacles that are not genuine, such as an outstretched pole that can more easily be run under or around as jumped over. And unlike Tobias, the Herr understands: to ask Baushan to jump it, he says “would be tantamount to a beating, for to demand something incomprehensible and—in its incomprehensibility—impossible from him is the same in his eyes as to seek pretense for a conflict, a disruption of friendship, a thrashing. … This is Baushan’s perspective, as far as I can tell” (245). The last statement is significant, moreover, because it indicates a skepticism on the narrator’s part that is an acknowledgment of his own limitations in understanding this dog whose actions are sometimes “utterly inscrutable” (245). It is an acknowledgment that Baushan has his own “logic” even if it is one that “language cannot adequately express” (245).

This separation of minds, however, does not prevent a profound relationship and even a mutual but healthy dependency from growing between the two. The narrator first describes this dependency from Baushan’s point of view as a kind of “mitsein,” or “being with,” that occurs even in absence, even when there is a forced separation for long periods of time. “He is not at my side, at my command, but that in itself is the execution of a command, a negative form of being-at-my-side, so that there can be no talk of Baushan’s leading an autonomous existence when we are apart” (235). Such a statement seems as much a projection onto Baushan of the narrator’s own inability to shake the dog from his mind as it is of Baushan’s dependence on him. He watches the dog through the glass door meant to separate them and feels the “sting” of leaving him at home on his trips into town. The intensity with which Baushan affects the narrator is made evident even in the narrative form itself, specifically in the number of “digressions” (287) he had no intention of including and in which he describes in detail various incidents of their life together. Indeed, these digressions are evidence of the narrator’s inability to forget the dog, even as they describe events he would most like to forget—and from which Baushan recovers only by forgetting.

One of these “stories” the narrator “never intended to tell” (287) describes Baushan’s extended stay at a veterinary clinic after revealing “unclean” symptoms—a bloody discharge from the nose—that do not go away. Evidence of his master’s concern, the episode also reveals his avoidance, if not abjection of Baushan’s animality, the need to separate himself from those natural elements of feces or blood or milk that are seen to defile the self and that are associated with the maternal–feminine.⁴¹ We see this need at the beginning of the novella as the narrator and his family form a circle around Baushan to shield him (and themselves) from the embarrassment of onlookers as he “suffered” through bouts of diarrhea. With regard to the clinic story, the narrator is proud of his decision to take his dog to such an esteemed institution of science and suggests Baushan should also be proud to be the object of “such educated, exact, scrutiny” (281). But Baushan is “broken in body and soul” (286) from this esteemed and civilized treatment—broken, moreover, not only because of his neglected animality, but in a manner that reveals what is “human” in that animality without the gloss of metaphor behind which we hide our own emotional states. Animals, the narrator explains, are “less inhibited, more primal, thus in a sense more human about the physical expression of their emotional states than we are. … Baushan ‘went,’ to use such a phrase, ‘with his head down’—that is he actually hung his head for all to see” (286). In other words, language, like the rational science of veterinary medicine, offers a means for us to avoid our own animal bodies, if not to appropriate animals for knowledge that yields no conclusion. The cause and origin of Baushan’s bleeding is never found. What the narrator learns, however, is that his own health deteriorates in Baushan’s absence. “As my own condition noticeably began to resemble Baushan’s in his cage I concluded that the bonds of sympathetic affinity were more conducive to my well-being than the egocentric freedom for which I had longed” (285).

Sickness is a theme running through much of Mann’s work, but, unlike Death in Venice or The Magic Mountain, Man and Dog does not simply associate health with bourgeois self-restraint and mastery or oppose health to the sickly attraction of decadent passion. To put it in the Nietzschean terms that Mann draws upon, the Apollonian ideal of individual freedom through self-mastery is not simply opposed to the Dionysian world of an erotic loss of self. Both of these paths can offer escapes from the responsibilities of emotional attachment as both refuse to see that illness may be a challenge to life and not opposed to it or that the self may be healthy in attachment to another. This is one of the lessons by which Baushan contributes to his master’s “bildung”—indeed, by which Baushan brings him to change his understanding of what it means to be a master. But it is not the only lesson. As we are told that the clinic story passed and faded into oblivion—at least for Baushan—the narrator returns to the story he had meant to tell, a story not of his separation from the dog through language and learning, but of their joint passion—the hunt.

The episode of the hunt begins with an alternate ideal of human and, indeed, masculine potential, an ideal of authenticity exemplified not by the professor of medicine, but by the warrior: “How handsome he becomes! How idealized, how perfect! Thus the young hayseed from the highlands becomes perfect and exemplary. Thus the Alpine deer hunter comes into his own. Everything fine, authentic and superlative in him rises to the surface during these hunting hours and is displayed in all its glory. He’s no pinscher, he’s a game dog and speaks from everyone of the masculine and primal warrior poses he strikes in rapid succession” (278–279).

Baushan as hunter exemplifies that virile, animal instinct celebrated by Nietzsche and later by National Socialism, but he is separated from the Nazi’s identification of this instinct with purity of breeding or race.⁴² It is in the hunt, moreover, that the narrator’s “gentlemanly sensibilities” rub up against his own animal instincts. On one level, hunting is what reveals a likeness in “hunter and dog.” Both hold a certain disdain for the “bourgeois complacency” of the ducks, who “refuse to play along with the hunt” (296). Both have a certain amount of “good judgment asserting itself over passion” and stopping them from a “plunge into the river swells” (294). But where Baushan pursues his “womanly” prey to the final end of bone-crunching consumption, for the narrator the hunt is primarily a form of aesthetic play, and he takes pleasure in spectatorship, not in the hunt itself. At times, he admits to taking enjoyment in “imaginative” identification with the various participants. Unable to assist Baushan in the actual kill, however, he admits to a “guilty conscience” at “not being the man to ‘drop’ the hare like a real master” (291). Indeed, his identification with the unrestrained animal desires he admires is checked by the sympathy he feels for the helpless prey—as when a little “demon” of a hare jumps unaccountably into his arms: “I felt, or thought I could feel, its frantic little heart trembling. … This same creature was now huddled against me in its moment of greatest need and despair, clinging to my knees, clinging to the needs of the man who was not only Baushan’s master but the master of the hare as well, i.e. its own master as much as Baushan’s” (292).⁴³ Returning to the master/slave dialectic that defeated Tobias Mindernickel, Mann questions anew the status of mastery as the narrator is brought to weigh his responsibility to the hare and to Baushan—a “real” hunter. In the narrator’s mind, a real hunter would simply and skillfully kill—like the “rough” man (“Mann” not “Herr”) in overalls who, to the shame of the narrator and Baushan, appears out of nowhere to shoot a duck in midair with his rifle, leap into the currents that neither Baushan nor the narrator would brave, and take his kill.

This hunt scene and the appearance of this other man brings to memory the opposing and, indeed, antagonistic forces that divide and thereby confuse the narrator’s sense of himself as master or “herr.” “Civilization and Culture: an antagonism,” wrote Nietzsche.⁴⁴ That antagonism structures the novella from the beginning: it opposes the two directions the narrator follows for his outings—whether into town on the train or into the woods with Baushan; it opposes the two dogs owned by the narrator, Perceval and Baushan, where the former is described as an “overbred eccentric” and the latter as having an “earthy common sense” (242); and it opposes the space of the clinic, where the body is repressed and denied, to the space of the hunt, where bodily passion is cultivated and gratified. Baushan’s hunting instinct is like the “spell” that comes over him in the presence of another dog, where “both are bound to each other in some obscure, volatile relationship they are not allowed to deny” (248). As the dogs sniff each other’s “procreative privates” and rub their bodies in an erotic if potentially threatening manner, the narrator acknowledges his foreignness to his dog’s world as well as his impotence before these beasts who appear able to put embarrassment or shame behind them.

Nietzsche, of course, had as much contempt for shame as for pity—both attitudes from which humans needed to liberate themselves in order to fulfill their full potential. But to the extent that Mann’s narrator may admire the dogs’ ability to forget the “embarrassment” he witnesses, he also comes to see that shame not only may be a form of taming but may also preserve or give life. Just as the question of mastery arises from within the hunting ground, so the morality of culture, or of what might be called “animal life” over and against bourgeois civilization, is itself divided between the demands of the dog and those of the hare, which is to say between a domesticated life force that longs to free itself of discipline by giving into violence and the wild prey that longs to live. In siding with the hare rather than with Baushan or the hunter, the narrator gives the gift of (animal) life but offers it through a denial of the (animal) passion of the hunt. In this way, the Herr’s examined civility (that is, aspiration rather than reflex) is what distinguishes him from Tobias, for whom culture and civilization are mutually destructive and for whom life affirmation depends on the domination and ultimate destruction of life. The question that then arises for the narrator and the reader is whether there is not some form or degree of civilization or domestication (and perhaps with it shame and pity) that is necessary for maintaining life.

In her study of Nietzsche’s animal philosophy, Vanessa Lemm describes the antagonism of culture and civilization in relation to animality and memory: “Whereas culture is the memory of animality and the affirming and holding onto the human beings’ continuity with the animals, civilization coincides with the forgetting of animality, the silencing of the animal within the human.”⁴⁵ In Lemm’s account, Nietzsche associates a healthy form of memory with culture and animality, in contrast to the burdensome past that humans carry with them to safeguard a specific morality. Both culture and civilization, moreover, function through a form of forgetting. Civilization, as described especially in the Genealogy of Morals, “tames” and thereby forgets the human animal through an imposition of moral and legal norms said to be necessary for life in society. This was Jacob’s rule over Esau, one that Mann’s Tobias never attains in his attempt to rule his own Esau. Culture, as Mann’s later narrator comes to understand though Baushan, offers a critique of civilization’s specific forgetting not in terms of some romantic dissolution of the self into nature, but rather through a feeding of animal appetite and the forgetting of those memories that forestall future action. Man “wonders also about himself—that he cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however: far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him,” Nietzsche writes. Then man says, “‘I remember …,’ and envies the beast that forgets at once and sees every moment really die, sink into night and mist, extinguished forever.”⁴⁶ Culture thus cultivates the “happy life” of the beast who lives “unhistorically,” knowing that “life in any true sense is absolutely impossible without forgetfulness.”⁴⁷ What Nietzsche calls the “historical sense,” much like the “bad conscience” that results from the moral life, “injures and ultimately destroys the living thing.”⁴⁸Although Mann’s story is critical of the repression of animality (and thus of animal forgetting), it also suggests that the cultivation of animality may necessitate some degree of civilization and thus of memory, some form of domestication as moral self-restraint so as not to give into the death drives of culture (and perhaps the German militarism set loose to support it). A civil domesticity—for Mann, one that fosters the kind of domestic relation exemplified by the Herr and his Hund (in contrast to Tobias and Esau), which is to say a relation engendered by both empathy and responsibility—depends on a degree of animal forgetting, to be sure. Referring to the hunting incident, the narrator writes, “Time and forgetting have covered it over, and our lives go on atop their swampy ground, which is the ground of all life” (302). Or at least the narrator imagines he witnesses such forgetting in Baushan as the dog slowly “regains his enthusiasm” for the hunt. For himself, however, forgetting is not so easy or not just a matter of time. Forgetting takes work; the narrator achieves it through writing. Writing for Mann is like “true” history for Nietzsche—a process of working through memory, of relieving oneself of its burden.⁴⁹ As much as the narrator might like to enter Baushan’s life or know how to enjoy his happiness, such truth is never delivered to him. Baushan, like Nietzsche’s beast, responds only in a silent look that leaves both wondering “What am I, Who am I, Is that me?” (299).⁵⁰ Writing cannot answer those questions, but it can help by offering to those who ask the “promise” of a future relationship.⁵¹ Writing, sustained as it is both by the self-mastery needed for solitary work and by the remembering to forget oneself so as to be moved by an animal and respond to his or her needs, is what allows the narrator to forget portions of the past for the sake of a future life to come. “Til tomorrow, Baushan,” the narrator tells him in closing, “assuming I don’t have to go out into the world” (302).