Melodie (24 page)

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.