124 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
would have “pinned down” the horses in much the same way that
Michael is being incarcerated in the hospital. Their bodies would
have been subsumed within a system of power that exerts arbitrary
control, the difference being that this would have been done to grat-
ify a South African elite keen to see the animals exert themselves in
a spectacle of physical competition.
Foe presents similar instances in which disciplinary power exerted
up on hu m a n s i s c ompa re d to t h at v i site d up on a n i m a l s. I n one sc ene,
Susan Barton describes Friday as a “watch-dog, raised with kindness
but kept from birth behind a locked gate,” an image that evokes the
disciplinary authority of the prison (p. 80). This depiction of the
imprisoned animal as an analogue of human incarceration is stated
in more explicit terms in Elizabeth Costello, when the protagonist
informs her son that “when zoos were first opened to the public,
the keepers had to protect the animals against attacks by spectators,
[... who... ] felt the animals were there to be insulted and abused,
like prisoners in a triumph” (p. 104). Thus, Coetzee’s animals are
not mere objects external to human society, but actors subjected to
the same disciplinary violence and control and, therefore, he appears
to suggest, entitled to comparable political rights as those demanded
by oppressed humans.
Wright is therefore correct when she states that Coetzee’s latter
novels move from juxtaposing human and animal suffering toward
conspicuous comparison. However, this observation should be cou-
pled with the recognition that the author also seeks to integrate both
forms of suffering within the same ethical and political field of dis-
course.^70 Again, such inclusive priorities find resonance with the
universal conciliatory aspirations of cosmopolitan thought, which
strive to appreciate and reconcile alternative modes of being and
seeing—or, to re-evoke the words of Sheldon Pollock, to cultivate
the capacity to inhabit “multiple places at once, of being different
beings simultaneously, of seeing the larger picture stereoscopically
with the smaller.”^71 Such aspirations are tentatively realized by Lurie
in Disgrace ; and, importantly, they are largely achieved through the
relationships he develops with animals. However, although a num-
ber of critics have commented on the significance Lurie’s relation-
ships with dogs play in his inner growth, none have attempted to