For Janina Duszejko, the Polish protagonist of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych), the Czech Republic, which is just over the shifting, imprecisely delineated border, is a strange utopia.1 In both Drive Your Plow and its film adaptation, Agnieszka Holland’s Pokot (Spoor, 2017), which was co-written with Tokarczuk, Duszejko – who prefers to be called by her last name – is a committed vegetarian and animal activist. She lives at a cultivated distance from an unnamed village in the Kłodzko Valley, a forested, mountainous region that borders the Czech Republic. If the line between the two countries is unreliable, Duszejko’s divisions are absolute, her world neatly organised into good and evil. The village’s hunting culture is the main target of her ire, and in both the novel and the film Duszejko frequently makes a spectacle of herself as she attempts to delimit or forbid its activities, charging through her small village like an Elizabeth Costello with even less credit, arguing with policemen, hunters and priests, and ruining the school play.2 Relentlessly discontent with reality as it is, the Duszejko of Drive Your Plow often thinks about her neighbouring utopia. Following a long illness, she dreams and dozes, telling us, “In my somnolent state I also thought about the Czech Republic. The border would appear in my mind, and that gentle, beautiful country beyond it.”3 Her fellow villagers are liars and hypocrites, the surrounding wilderness is riddled with animal slaughter and a series of inexplicable murders, but, she believes, “[I]n the Czech Republic it’s totally different. The people there are capable of discussing things calmly and nobody quarrels with anyone else. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t, because their language isn’t suited to quarrelling.”4 Animals flee to the Czech Republic, and the sun does too. The phone signal, as if an analogue of her desire, wanders across the border. When Duszejko tries to call the police in order to report the first mysterious death the automated voice that replies does so in Czech.
In his essay ‘The Politics of Utopia’, Fredric Jameson writes that utopia is “one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation.”5 They are nowhere, not places, imaginary, and by their very nature utopias are detached, hovering over our world in order to comment on it. For Jameson, their purpose is diagnostic. Bessie Rubinstein beautifully paraphrases this idea in one of her reviews for Another Gaze : “Utopias critique by differentiation, springing from lack.”6 Here as elsewhere there is the language of distance: utopia as a moving-away. What does Duszejko achieve, then, by telescoping the utopic into a country just across the border? To try to pull a utopia closer usually means earthly compromise, a limiting of imagination’s free play. Later, Jameson suggests that “utopia emerges at the moment of the suspension of the political.”7 Despite both her meticulous nature and her former career as a bridge engineer, which, I assume, revolved around practical questions of how to build things, Duszejko’s vision of the Czech Republic is utterly indistinct; interestingly, the question of whether the Czechs themselves hunt animals, or eat them, or wear their fur is never addressed. Concrete political issues are replaced by an absolute binary of good and evil and a language that itself limits the possibility of doing bad. Just a stone’s throw away, Duszejko’s Czech Republic is about as existentially distant as it gets. By placing it nearby she paradoxically renders it even more unreal; its power of commentary even more tragic. And although the border between the two countries is porous, at first there seems to be no path capable of leading Duszejko to the vague Elysium of the Czech Republic. Instead, she battles it out where she is.
As the story continues, one hunting season inexorably rolls into another, and even when the law is on Duszejko’s side none of the relevant authorities seem interested in upholding it. After she accuses her neighbour of animal poaching and of abusing his dog, the village police commandant rolls his eyes and tries to usher her out of his office. She returns a few months later to report that a boar has been killed outside of the mandated hunting season, “beyond the legal deadline.”8 Wielding the law, Duszejko uses an instrument that she herself believes is absurd – why is it okay to kill someone on one day and not another? – to limited effect. Next she pulls out “a ball of bloodstained Boar bristles”9 and places it on the desk in front of the policemen. Shocked, they lean forward to look at it, but immediately recoil and turn away. This pattern is repeated throughout the novel and the film: Duszejko shows the authorities – and us – the scene or proof of a crime and points out that this is simply a localised expression of a far vaster crime, that of structurally sanctioned animal murder on a global scale. The law is not only lazy and disinterested, but entirely insufficient when it comes to addressing the larger problem. Although it isn’t controversial to hate hunters, or to rail against the industrial meat industry, Duszejko founds her despair on a solid bedrock of anti-humanism, which is much more contentious. Midway through Drive Your Plow she concludes that, “Someone has made us badly. […] The angels, if they really do exist, must be splitting their sides laughing at us.”10 This is a negative visioning of humanity that perhaps ought to belong to our times but doesn’t, despite ongoing revelations of planetary abuse, and so Duszejko’s philosophising has an isolated, bitter edge that does not endear her to her fellow villagers. The inconvenienced policeman isn’t entirely wrong when he tells her, “You’re more concerned about the fate of animals than people”.11 But Duszejko isn’t exactly short on evidence: the hunters continue to hunt; the villagers continue to eat meat. Nearby, Innerd keeps a fox farm. He is also the owner of the local brothel. “Can we possibly fall even lower?” she wonders.12
In an earlier work, Primeval and Other Times, Tokarczuk writes,
People think they live more intensely than animals, than plants, and especially than things. Animals sense that they live more intensely than plants and things. Plants dream that they live more intensely than things. But things last, and this lasting is more alive than anything else.13
In the shadowy borderland between the Czech Republic and Poland even this gentle hierarchy – to think, sense, dream – is dismantled. Drive Your Plow approaches the natural world through Duszejko’s obsessive subjectivity, which slants so antithetical to human exceptionalism that at times a rare equivalence is achieved: we see Duszejko as simply one more thing in a living world made of living things. Her refusal to accept the traditional hierarchy between humans and other animals leads to a broader kind of narrative toppling. In Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel DeLanda describes the concept of a ‘flat ontology’ as one “made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status.”14 Heidegger’s famous division between world-forming Daisen (weltbidend), poor-in-the-world animals (weltarm), and wordless objects (weltlos) is done away with: here there is no true grading between universal and particular, subject and object, essence and instance, and everything makes an equal claim to existence.15 Consequently, each and every object must be approached on its own terms, without the usual recourse to what philosopher Graham Harman defines as ‘undermining’.16 When we undermine objects, we see them as the effect of something more fundamental – objects are simply masks for other forces. Meanwhile ‘overmining’ refuses objects depth altogether, reducing them to “their impact on us or on each other, denying them any excess or surplus beyond that impact”.17
In order to see the world honestly we must eschew both, along with a belief in the possibility of direct knowledge. It remains to be seen whether any kind of ontological equality can pave the way to an ethical one, of course, but the necessity of finding a new way of seeing and approaching reality is something that unites a broad group of contemporary thinkers.
This has consequences. As Levi Bryant puts it in The Democracy of Objects, “the broader strategic import of the concept of flat ontology is to diminish the obsessive focus on the human, subjective and the cultural within social, political, cultural theory and philosophy.”18 Tokarczuk is interested in this expansive, speculative way of looking. Drive Your Plow is full of animals that often appear as themselves, not as symbols for something else. There are Duszejko’s missing dogs, whom she calls the “Little Girls”; a dying boar; the deer who skip across the border; the mink imprisoned in Innerd’s farm; and a solitary, dignified fox who is known as the Consul. So too do objects make a beeline for life. Tokarczuk’s vivid language takes us where imagination or empathy might fail to climb: the air is “sharp as a razor”;19 the sky is like a dirty screen. What begins as simile is later explicitly anthropomorphic: the narrator observes the “tiny little faces”20 of the daisies, while on one dank winter’s evening the clouds are spotted “rubbing their wet bellies against the hills”.21 Duszejko’s affinity with her surroundings makes me think of Jane Bennett’s insistence in Vibrant Matter that a little anthropomorphism is a good thing, that it can “counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world.”22 For Bennett, seeing something of ourselves in the rest of the world can be the first step towards saving it. Sometimes these sympathies are painful. In Drive Your Plow, hunting pulpits become “exclamation marks stuck out of the ground, sharp needles piercing the scenery”, cutting the eye as it moves over them.23 At other times sympathies are ecstatic, sublime: “Everything was starting to crackle, I could sense a feverish vibration under the grass, under the layer of earth, as if vast, underground nerves, swollen with effort, were just about to burst.”24
It is with regard to this levelling that the relationship between Drive Your Plow and Pokot is most interesting. Questions of cinematic ontology often bring up the flattening or democratising impulse of the frame, in which all objects, human or nonhuman, are seen as existing equally. Stanley Cavell explores this position in The World Viewed, where he writes that “photographs are of the world, in which human beings are not ontologically favored over the rest of nature, in which objects are not props but natural allies (or enemies) of the human character.”25 The camera involves a way of seeing that is potentially aligned with Harman’s wish that we avoid undermining or overmining whatever we encounter. Later, Cavell argues that “[f]ilm returns us to and extends our first fascination with objects, with their inner and fixed lives.”26 Pokot encourages us to look as Duszejko looks. We see animals, the texture of their fur and the way that their eyes gleam in artificial light. We see a boar expiring in the snow and maggots teeming in the eyes of a lonely corpse. We see the generalised misery of Innerd’s fur farms and the individual deaths that wound Duszejko, that of the two dogs whose disappearance devastates her. In Pokot there is no image of the Czech Republic to act as reprieve, no proffered utopia. Instead the film is relentlessly preoccupied with the precise nature of everyday cruelty and lays out exactly what is at stake in Duszejko’s quarrelling with the authorities. If the visual inclusiveness of the medium described by Cavell also returns us to our fascination with animals, and posits some kind of ontological equality, it also acts as bloody disclosure. Shots of tiny, filthy cages and wounded bodies are either the truth or so close to it that showing them has a similar function, and the consistent attention Pokot gives to these spectacles of animal suffering means that at times it resembles the undercover videos shot by animals rights activists. Elsewhere, the film’s eschewing of Drive Your Plow’s first-person voice connects us with Duszejko’s suffering in a more visceral way. Events that in the novel are emotionally distanced through the use of the past tense rise up in Pokot’s eternally shifting present: we observe Duszejko’s desperate search for her dogs, her stumbling and wailing in the snow, and the way that she physically experiences the contempt of the authorities. This is often painful to watch. By sidelining Drive Your Plow’s focus on the utopic, Pokot wields more immediate political mileage. The issue of animal suffering is made urgent, tangible; in being led to literally see what Duszejko sees, are we more likely to share her ethical viewpoint?
I think the answer to this question is that showing has its limits. In the end, I’m not sure that the film accomplishes more or less than the book does, even with the added component of visibility. When Duszejko presents the policeman with a handful of murdered flesh he turns his eyes away. Identifying a problem by no means leads to its resolution, which is something that pinning our hopes on visibility as a political tool often elides or ignores – sometimes things are only ‘hidden’ because we want them to be. Duszejko doesn’t exactly make progress with her fellow villagers and the world hasn’t yet gone vegetarian (or vegan), although there has had plenty of evidence that it ought to. In Drive Your Plow, Duszejko describes one of her ‘Theories’ [sic] – that the human mind is organised in such a way as to protect us from confronting the truth. We do not want to see reality as it is “[f]or it would be impossible to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.”27 Duszejko is talking about cognitive dissonance. Many of us are horrified by images of slaughterhouse brutality. Many of us will say that we think it is terrible. But the world limps on in much the same way.
Consequently, the politics of spectatorship are often (but not always) inert. It is also significant that Duszejko neither develops nor shares her dream of the Czech Republic. In his essay, Jameson goes on to further complicate the idea of utopia, arguing that:
“Utopia is somehow negative; and that it is most authentic when we cannot imagine it. Its function lies not in helping us to imagine a better future but rather in demonstrating our incapacity to imagine such a future […] so as to reveal the ideological closure of the system in which we are somehow trapped and confined.”28
Secretive and indistinct, Duszejko’s utopia can neither tell us much nor help us practically towards a better world. It simply highlights the awfulness of the present. Pokot, which through its golden final scene delegates Drive Your Plow’s utopic vision to the extradiegetic position of the afterlife, is even more gruelling than the novel, but Duszejko’s efforts to convince the other villagers to change their behaviour are similarly futile. What Duszejko learns is that both envisioning the world as it could be and exposing the world for what it is have limited practical value. Utopias hover; they do not solve. Meanwhile, it often feels as though revelations of ongoing environmental destruction and animal slaughter in landscapes desolated by wildfire, or in the deoxygenated oceans, or in the slaughterhouses of our own making, lack the power of revelations as such. And then, how much good can an emergent way of seeing or thinking about the nonhuman world, or an “ontology capable of doing justice to these strange nonhuman actors”, do in the immediate present?29 Duszejko favours action. She does not stop at being the change one wants to see, but decides to force it on others, too. The police commander’s body is found surrounded by a flurry of hoofprints while the decaying body of Innerd, the fur trader, is found with one leg trapped in a snare. The poacher Big Foot, Duszejko’s neighbour, chokes on a bone from the deer he killed earlier, whose severed head watches him die. These fantasies of reciprocity do, in the end, turn out to be fantasies. Duszejko has been killing the hunters all along, having begun after the discovery that her Little Girls were the accidental victims of a broader slaughter. Every one of the murdered hunters was guilty of participating in these specific murders. If this revelation reads as tragic it is because for a moment it felt as though nature were responding, clearly and explicitly, to the wrongs that are carried out against it. When the local hunters start dying, Duszejko initially insists that it is the animals who are doing the killing. The villagers at first reject this idea, but it becomes increasingly persuasive with the unveiling of the eye-for-an-eye circumstances of every single death, and there are other characters who are equally keen to see what Duszejko sees. In Drive Your Plow she talks to a rural dentist as he operates outdoors, the white dental chair surrounded by bright green grass and the patient’s mouth “wide open to the Sun.”30 When she tells him that animals are killing hunters, he mutters “Yes, it’s possible […] It really is possible, there has to be some justice, doesn’t there? Yes, yes. Animals.”31
How do you solve a problem like Duszejko? Like J. M. Coetzee’s troubled academic, Duszejko is a problem: no longer able to accept or follow social norms, she malfunctions, and the majority of the people she encounters do not empathise with her nor understand her grievance. Even her few friends tiptoe around her ideas, although they eventually come out to support her.32 But Duszejko is also a problem-solver. In the novel she reaches a decision: “[T]he truth is that anyone who feels Anger, and does not take action, merely spreads the infection.”33 And so she methodically kills the hunters who have inflicted so much damage, avenges the animals that she has wept over, and fittingly – and how much I love Tokarczuk for this! – escapes unpunished.
1. Olga Tokarczuk, (tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones), Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, London: Fitzcarraldo Editions (2018). Translated from Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2009. 2. I am referring to J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist of The Lives of Animals (1999) and Elizabeth Costello (2003), whose relentless focus on the issue of animal suffering alienates her family, friends and audiences. 3. Olga Tokarczuk, p. 91. 4. Ibid. p. 189. 5. Fredric Jameson, ‘The Politics of Utopia’, New Left Review 25, Jan/Feb 2004. 6. Bessie Rubinstein, ‘Dominga Sotomayor’s Unstable Utopias: ‘Too Late To Die Young’ (‘Tarde Para Morir Joven’)’, Another Gaze, Issue 3, p. 103. 7. Ibid. 8. Olga Tokarczuk, p. 109. 9. Ibid. p. 110. 10. Ibid. p. 90-91. 11. Ibid. p. 115. 12. Ibid. p. 69. 13. Olga Tokarczuk (tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones), Primeval and Other Times, Twisted Spoon Press, 2010, p. 43. Translated from Prawiek i inne czasy, Wydawnictwo W.A.B, 1996. 14. Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, London: Bloomsbury, 2002, p. 47. 15. Martin Heidegger (tr. William McNeil and Nicholas Walker), The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996, p. 185. 16. Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, London: Penguin, 2018, p. 41. 17. Ibid. p. 49. 18. Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects, London: Open Humanities Press, 2011, p. 246. 19. Drive Your Plow, p. 41. 20. Ibid. p. 128. 21. Ibid. p. 80. 22. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, p. xvi. 23. Drive Your Plow, p. 64. 24. Ibid. p. 145. 25. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, New York: Viking Press, 1971, p. 37. 26. Ibid. p. 43. 27. Drive Your Plow, p. 223. 28. Fredric Jameson. 29. Levi Bryant, p. 248. 30. Drive Your Plow, p. 140. 31. Ibid. p. 143. 32. This is especially true in Pokot, where they all escape to something I read as a beautiful dream of the Czech Republic. 33. Ibid. p. 65.
MISSOURI WILLIAMS is a writer and co-editor of Another Gaze. Her first novel, The Doloriad, will be published by Dead Ink Books and FSG.
