The elusiveness of shame: Reading for affect and emotion in Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Animalia Paradoxa”

Introduction: Emotions and political recalcitrance

Henrietta Rose-Innes is the author of two collections of short stories: Homing (2010) and Animalia Paradoxa (2019). In contrast to her novels, few of her stories have received critical attention, although there are indications that this trend may be changing. Recently, two articles about her short fiction have been published: Aghogho Akpome’s analysis of “Poison”, included in The Short Story in South Africa: Contemporary Trends and Perspectives (2022), and Graham Riach’s discussion of “Falling” and “Homing” in The Short Story After Apartheid (2023). Both of these critical interventions consider Rose-Innes’s stories in the sociopolitical context of post-apartheid South Africa — an approach that is consistent with her observation that writers have a “responsibility” (2022: 222) to engage with the country’s past and present by telling different stories, all of which have one important similarity: “Light and heavy, big and small, they are all necessarily political” (2022: 222–23).

This article concentrates on the sociopolitical dimension of Rose-Innes’s story “Animalia Paradoxa” by analysing the affects and emotions it conveys. In my reading of Rose-Innes’s story, I am guided by Bede Scott’s affective approach to colonial and postcolonial literature. Scott argues that “certain sociopolitical forces give rise to dominant ‘structures of feeling’ within colonial and postcolonial societies” (2019: 6). He points out that emotions are shaped by historical processes, and they can be transferred from one person to another (in other words, they are both psychogenic and sociogenic). As emotions begin to permeate literature, they can manifest themselves in “the atmospheric or tonal qualities that any given narrative generates” (Scott, 2019: 10). In postcolonial literature, adds Scott, these emotions often have a “pathological dimension” (2019: 13), which stems from countries’ turbulent histories and rapid processes of sociopolitical change. Among the dysphoric emotions that Scott enumerates (following Ato Quayson (2003)) are guilt and anxiety. While both will be mentioned in the discussion that follows, my reading of “Animalia Paradoxa” will be devoted to shame.

This article will explore the elusiveness of shame in “Animalia Paradoxa” by showing that this affect is communicated without necessarily being named. As I will argue, shame in Rose-Innes’s story is both expressed and suppressed; more specifically, a certain kind of shame is conveyed at the cost of others. Postcolonial affect theory has referred to this mechanism of simultaneous expression and suppression as “the double discourse of shame” (Charos, 2009: 280), or “the double movement of shame” (Attwell, et al., 2019: 17). By directing our attention to this double movement of concealment and exposure, Rose-Innes sheds light on the pervasive but also elusive presence of shame in post-apartheid South Africa.

This article is divided into two parts. In the first part, I will consider “Animalia Paradoxa” against the background of South African literature in the post-apartheid era. I will then introduce the basic concepts connected with affect theory and apply them in a detailed discussion of Rose-Innes’s story.

“Animalia Paradoxa” in the context of post-apartheid literature

Before appearing in Rose-Innes’s second collection of short stories, “Animalia Paradoxa” was included in an anthology titled Irregularity (2014), which was published to coincide with a 2014 exhibition, Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. The story takes its title from Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735), specifically from a section that is titled “Animalia Paradoxa”, in which Linnaeus includes mythical animals described in historical records but not yet seen in reality. The story’s nameless narrator is a French naturalist who has embarked on an exploration of areas north of Cape Town to find rare species of animals for his wealthy employer, a French aristocrat who is referred to as the Countess. The story begins in Île-de-France in the autumn of 1792, at some point after the September Massacres (described as “the recent troubles in Paris” (203)). ¹

The second part of the story focuses on the man’s exploration of South Africa, probably in the years preceding the beginning of the French Revolution. The expedition, whose chief goal is to collect rare species of animals, soon ends with failure, as the explorer’s Khoekhoe servants, frightened by the local Boer commando, escape into the mountains. In retaliation, they are hunted down and brutally murdered. One of the victims is a boy called Jacques, whom the explorer befriended during the expedition. While the narrator reports no emotional reaction to this brutal display of domination, Jacques’s death affects him in a profound way — indeed, I would argue that the dysphoric emotions he experiences have their origin in this episode and his feeling of indirect responsibility for the crimes that were committed by the Boers.

In the third part of the story, we are taken back to the orangery of the Countess’s castle, which is attacked by an angry mob who set fire to the buildings. In a desperate and absurd attempt to defend his specimens, the man tries to save a large egg that he found in Africa — unsuccessfully, since the egg breaks, releasing a winged creature not yet recorded by any naturalist. After hatching from the huge egg, the creature takes flight, rising above the burning buildings: “It rises up again, on wings of smoke and fire” (222). This intriguing sentence, which concludes the story, makes a tentative connection between this awesome, ominous creature and the dramatic events unfolding in central France; indeed, it seems that the creature has — by the end of the story — become a symbol of the anger and violence of the revolutionaries.

Situated on the boundary between realism and fantasy, “Animalia Paradoxa” is an expression of Rose-Innes’s creative engagement with speculative fiction, which is evident also in her earlier works, including the novels Nineveh (2011) and Green Lion (2015). Commenting on the fact that Nineveh is set in a partly imaginary location which is nevertheless modelled on Cape Town, Rose-Innes points out that she “like[s] to keep on that line of uncertainty between the real and unreal” (Ryman, 2017) — a reflection that is pertinent also in the context of “Animalia Paradoxa”, whose narrator balances on the thin line between the real and the imaginary, the scientific and the irrational. Similarly to Green Lion, the “speculative trope” (to use Rose-Innes’s phrase) concentrates on an animal, but while in Green Lion the animal — the black-maned lion — really existed (it became extinct in the nineteenth century), the bird-like creature described at the end of “Animalia Paradoxa” is an animal beyond any recorded history. The appearance of this mysterious and menacing creature conveys what Rose-Innes has described as “a strong theme” in her stories, namely the fact that her speculative stories are “imprinted with increasing strangeness” (Ryman, 2017).

While “Animalia Paradoxa” contains clear elements of speculative fiction, it is also firmly placed in the colonial history of South Africa. In her interview with Geoff Ryman (2017), Rose-Innes described “Animalia Paradoxa” as “an alternative history about the French Revolution and naturalists in eighteenth-century South Africa”. Although she does not give any more detail about the story’s genesis, it may have been inspired by the life and work of François Levaillant (1753–1824), who was best known as an ornithologist and a discoverer of new bird species. Whether or not Levaillant is the inspiration here, it is significant that Rose-Innes decided to approach the history of her country from the perspective of a foreigner, who, at first, inhabits the position of a disinterested observer but ultimately finds himself confronted with the moral and emotional burden of the atrocities he witnesses. This tension between detachment and involvement makes it possible to explore the topic of indirect responsibility and the complex feelings that this triggers, most importantly, guilt and shame.

While Rose-Innes places her story in a clearly defined historical setting, she also approaches it from an outside perspective by moving between different cultures and geographies. In this sense, “Animalia Paradoxa” can be considered in the wider context of what Leon de Kock describes (after Loren Kruger) as “the post-anti-apartheid era” (2005: 70), in which South African writers, free to leave behind the crises and conflicts of the past, have embraced “a more liberatory repertoire for the improvisation of individual identity” (2005: 77). In this group, de Kock includes Rose-Innes and her novel The Rock Alphabet (2004). Rose-Innes is also mentioned by Rita Barnard as one of the South African authors who, no longer bound by the project of forging national unity, have embraced more international trends, for example, magical realism — an especially pertinent comment in the context of Rose-Innes’s fascination with speculative fiction. At the same time, argues Barnard, short-story writers have turned their attention to “more local ways of meaning — to region, interiority, the single encounter” (2012: 666). “Animalia Paradoxa” shows that the two trends are not mutually exclusive: writers can seek affiliations with larger literary trends while focusing on “interiority” and “the single encounter” (2012: 666).

In Barnard’s view, short-story writers in the post-apartheid era have put emphasis on “more local ways of meaning” (2012: 666) because the short story as a literary form is — in comparison to the novel — “less subject to the pressure of being interpreted as national allegory” (2012: 666). She makes this claim in the context of Michael Titlestad’s argument about the influence of the modernist short story on contemporary South African literature. Referring to Titlestad, Barnard argues that the modernist short story, with its propensity for suspension and indeterminacy, can capture the experience of living in post-apartheid South Africa “even as that experience becomes less distinctive, more transnational and translatable” (2012: 667). This claim was first made by Titlestad in his afterword to David Medalie’s collection The Mistress’s Dog and Other Stories (2010). Titlestad points out that before the democratic changes, writers had lived with the “sense of approaching catastrophe” and “the hope for liberation”, both of which were shaped by a teleological view of South African history. While this belief in the inevitable progression of history (a source of both anxiety and hope) was still prevalent in the years following the democratic elections, the situation has changed, and there is no longer the same belief in the forward march of history. As a result, “many [writers] reflect instead lives caught in-between an old order that has […] disappeared, and the uncertainties of the future” (2010: n.p.)

In Titlestad’s understanding, the modernist short story is capable of expressing the sense of suspension and indeterminacy that characterizes the lives of South Africans in the post-apartheid era. He is referring specifically to the inherent indeterminacy of the modernist short story:

At their best, modernist short stories are never pedantic; they never resolve the matters they raise, but rather leave both their characters and readers suspended on the brink of a recognition that remains — for all of its powerful implications — somewhat inchoate, just out of reach. (2010: n.p.)

It is worth adding that a similar observation has more recently been made by Corinne Sandwith, Rebecca Fasselt, and Khulukazi Soldati-Kahimbaara, who observe that the modernist short story aptly conveys the sense of “postapartheid disillusionment” stemming from the fact that the sense of directedness and purpose that was once associated with the notion of transition has expired, “leaving indeterminacy and plot loss in its place” (2022: 10). According to the authors, this structure of feeling is particularly well conveyed by the modernist short story “with its proclivity for fragmentation and open-endedness” (2022: 10).

Before commenting on those observations, let me emphasize that my goal in this discussion is not to explore modernist influences in Rose-Innes’s prose but to claim that she incorporates some features of modernist short stories into her works, most importantly “the cultivation of paradox and ambiguity” (Head, 1992/2009: 185). Titlestad’s comment on “characters and readers suspended on the brink of a recognition” is resonant here insofar as it evokes the notion of ambivalent epiphany, as discussed by Dominic Head in his study of the modernist short story. In his reading of stories by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield, Head shows that their protagonists find themselves “at the brink of a vision” but often fail to grasp the truth of those insights because of their various limitations of perception, shaped by their social and ideological conditioning (Head, 1992/2009: 136). This observation is pertinent in the discussion of “Animalia Paradoxa”, in which the narrator finds himself “at the brink of a vision” and in the throes of powerful emotions, which point to a truth that nevertheless remains unexpressed. Those intense emotions, specifically shame, will now be explored, first in the context of affect studies and then in a close reading of “Animalia Paradoxa”.

Shame in the context of affect theory

In his seminal work Affect Imagery Consciousness (1962–1992), the American psychologist Silvan Tomkins defines shame as “the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression and of alienation” (2008: 351). According to Tomkins, the impact of shame is profound, leaving the person experiencing it in a state of vulnerability and exposure. Overcome by shame, the humiliated one feels “naked, defeated, alienated, lacking in dignity or worth” (2008: 351). Taking into account its overwhelming nature, it is not surprising that Tomkins refers to shame as “a sickness of the soul” (2008: 351).

For Tomkins, shame, specifically shame-humiliation, is one of nine affects. ² While the other kinds of affects that Tomkins distinguishes are not of crucial importance to this discussion (aside from interest-excitement, which, as I will show, is closely connected to shame), the notion of affect requires further commentary. In Tomkins’s theory, affect refers to an innate physiological reaction whose goal is to motivate actions by neurological and physiological changes. An inherent part of our system of motivation, affects can fuse with biological drives, thoughts, perceptions, and other affects to produce distinct states of consciousness, which Tomkins calls feelings and emotions. While the term “feeling” refers to the awareness that one is experiencing a particular affect, “emotion” is used to denote a feeling that is cognitively processed and combined with the memory of our previous experience of a given affect.

The affect-emotion distinction is made by Tomkins at the beginning of his analysis of shame, when he makes the following observation about shyness, shame, and guilt: “They are one and the same affect. This is not to say that shyness in the presence of a stranger, shame at a failure to cope successfully with a challenge, and guilt for an immorality are the same experience” (2008: 351). What makes them different, argues Tomkins, is the way in which they are combined with other elements, including drives, cognitive postures, and one’s affective memory. While Tomkins calls shyness, shame, and guilt “experiences” (2008: 351), I will refer to them as emotions. ³

Tomkins’s theory can help to capture the affective dynamic of “Animalia Paradoxa”, in which embarrassment, discomfiture, and guilt (below I will make a distinction between guilt and vicarious shame) are distinct emotions, but they all stem from the same affect of shame. What is interesting in Rose-Innes’s story is how they combine and merge with each other. While they are distinct emotions, the boundary between them is by no means set and impermeable; on the contrary, shame in “Animalia Paradoxa” is an affect which — depending on the circumstances — manifests itself as different emotions, some of which are clearly expressed, while others are only suggested.

Tomkins’s theory has had an important influence on later researchers of affect, including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, who edited a collection of Tomkins’s writing titled Shame and Its Sisters (1995). Tomkins’s influence on Sedgwick can also be seen in her collection Touching Feeling, in which she famously defines shame as “a kind of free radical that […] attaches to and permanently intensifies or alters the meaning of — almost anything” (2003: 62), including behaviours, affects, and identities. Because of this inherent tendency, shame constitutes an immanent part of our perception of ourselves and others. Sedgwick’s interest in how shame manifests itself in our perception of the world is evident in an autobiographical passage in which she describes her reaction to noticing the absence of the Twin Towers in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks. Looking at the empty landscape, Sedgwick reports feeling shame. Trying to make sense of this reaction, she refers to Tomkins and his work Affect Imagery Consciousness. According to Tomkins, shame is triggered by a situation in which “one is suddenly looked at by one who is strange, or because one wishes to look at or commune with another person but suddenly cannot because he is strange” (Tomkins, 2008: 354). In Sedgwick’s case, shame can also be described as a feeling of discomfiture that stems from the realization that the landscape, once known (and expected to be known), has become unfamiliar.

Following Tomkins, Sedgwick connects the experience of strangeness with the affect of shame, but it should be emphasized here that the former does not necessarily lead to the latter. Shame occurs when this realization of strangeness is so profound that it shows one’s expectations to be unrealistic and out of touch with reality. Shame, in the experience of strangeness, shows the irrelevance of our attitude towards the object, exposing our limitations and weaknesses. Without this acute realization of one’s inadequacy, shame would not come into being — in its place, there would be only surprise and confusion.

The connection between strangeness and shame is strongly present in postcolonial affect theories, for example, in Timothy Bewes’s study of postcolonial literature, in which he argues that “shame is an event of incommensurability: a profound disorientation of the subject by the confrontation with an object it cannot comprehend, an object that renders incoherent every form available to the subject” (2011: 3; emphasis added). The powerful wording of this definition highlights my point about the experience of weakness and inadequacy: the “profound disorientation” shows the complete failure of the subject to find forms that would be capable of rendering familiar the strangeness encountered.

The second connection between Tomkins’s and Sedgwick’s approaches to shame and postcolonial theory can be found in the contention that shame originates in a situation of impeded communication, aptly described by Tomkins in the following words: “In shame I wish to continue to look and to be looked at, but I also do not wish to do so” (2008: 361). This reaction illustrates the affective dynamic of shame, more specifically the close interaction between shame and the affect of interest-excitement. According to Tomkins, shame is triggered by “the incomplete reduction of interest or joy” (2008: 353). In shame, I do not wish to entirely dissociate myself from the object (this would be a reaction of disgust) but to maintain some kind of contact, even if confusion blocks meaningful and satisfactory communication. In Tomkins’s theory of affects, shame is closely dependent on interest-excitement. Without interest, there would be no shame.

At a textual level, this conflicted reaction of wanting to maintain contact and withdrawing from it can be described with the use of Caitlin Charos’s term “the double discourse of shame” (2009: 280). In her article about the novels of Zoë Wicomb and Phaswane Mpe, Charos observes that both Wicomb and Mpe “seem drawn to shame, not only as a theme, but as a narrative mechanism: the double discourse of shame has a singular capacity to both expose and conceal, to probe what appears in discourse and what is suppressed” (2009: 280). Charos adds that literary works often reflect the functioning of shame, based on the logic of partial revelation and suppression. This critical framework for studying shame was also adopted by David Attwell, Annalisa Pes, and Susanna Zinato, who argue that fiction is unique in its ability to convey what they call the “double movement” of shame: “Our contention […] is that the literary, and fiction in particular, can house the aporetic ‘double movement’ that characterizes the relation entertained by shame with language/speech, that is of avoidance and at the same time of urge to tell” (2019: 17). The reflection on the double movement of shame sheds light on its elusiveness, as it manifests itself in “Animalia Paradoxa”. Viewed from this perspective, elusiveness lies in the fact that the story gives expression to shame but rarely names it, as if its narrator is, for some reason, unable or unwilling to address it.

Incommensurability and shame in “Animalia Paradoxa”

I begin my discussion of “Animalia Paradoxa” by referring to Bewes and his connection between shame and incommensurability. My goal in this part of the discussion is to explore this connection by focusing on the story’s symbolic imagery, specifically the mysterious object that remains at the centre of the story — the egg that the narrator finds during his expedition in Africa and brings back home to France. The egg, described as “gigantic” (215), is a figure of shame in at least two respects. First, it is an object that threatens to show the inadequacy of existing scientific knowledge (represented by Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae). At the same time, the egg is a potential source of humiliation for the narrator because it is a token of his commitment to the story about the improbable creature described to him by the people he encounters during his expedition. In this sense, the egg represents the narrator’s ultimate gamble as a naturalist. On the one hand, it carries the promise of success if it does indeed hold an as yet unknown and undescribed creature (an empty promise, one may add, since the egg, once it is extracted from its habitat, cannot possibly give shelter and sustenance to a living being); on the other, the egg represents the narrator’s investment in the story about the mythical, part-animal and part-human creature, compromising his sceptical and scientific stance.

If shame is the tonal quality of “Animalia Paradoxa”, the central ambiguity of this story lies in the task of attributing this feeling to a clearly defined cause. The affective complexity of Rose-Innes’s story can be illustrated on the basis of a brief but significant scene in which Jacques tries to describe the rare animal held by the egg found in the sand. Incapable of communicating this knowledge verbally, Jacques resorts to the language of gestures: “He bowed his neck and kicked at the ground, arms out like wings, then opened his mouth very wide and groaned. Teeth like the white quartz in the rocks, not porcelain at all. Teeth bared as if in pain” (215). This pantomime is suddenly brought to an end by the narrator with the terse phrase: “That’s enough” (215). As is mostly the case in Rose-Innes’s story, the affective context of this episode remains unclear, constituting a gap which is all the more apparent for the uncharacteristically abrupt and hostile reaction of the narrator. One possible interpretation is to attribute this reaction to impatience stemming from the conviction that despite his repeated requests, Jacques cannot adequately describe the creature to him. Nonetheless, Jacques’s strange pantomime invites other possible responses. If we consider shame as a possible reaction of the narrator, we arrive at an ambiguity that constitutes the fulcrum of this scene. Shame in this context can be viewed in at least two ways. First, it can indicate the narrator’s failure to meet the standards of his scientific community; in this case, the narrator experiences shame because he has ridiculed himself by putting faith in the far-fetched story about the exotic creature. Another possible interpretation is to see the narrator’s reaction in terms of discomfiture at having witnessed Jacques’s theatrical depiction of the elusive creature. Understood as a combination of shame and confusion, discomfiture is closely related to Bewes’s understanding of shame as an experience of incommensurability. In this sense, the narrator’s discomfiture stems from the keen awareness of having witnessed an event that he cannot fully comprehend and capture within the critical framework available to him, specifically Linnaeus’s classification of existing and mythical animals. Indeed, Jacques’s pantomime of the animal is confusing and somewhat unsettling because of the enacted creature’s intense reaction, poised between hostility and suffering, as if it has just been seriously wounded and is about to fight for its life. It seems as if Jacques, willingly or otherwise, has captured a primal reaction of this creature — the desperate, perhaps final attempt to cling to life — which makes the animal disconcertingly real to the viewer. As described by Jacques, the enacted animal is situated between reality and fantasy, between the real and the imaginary, offering an insight that challenges existing scientific classifications.

While Rose-Innes rarely identifies feelings in her story, she does point to a continuity in experiencing them, doing so with the use of recurring images. Arguably, the most important image is that of bared teeth. Used for the first time in the description of Jacques’s pantomime, it recurs later in the story, in the narrator’s account of his return voyage. Having noticed — to his desperation — that his precious specimens are beginning to decompose, he nevertheless decides to guard them by sleeping on the trunks in which they are stored. In one dream, he is transported back to his time in South Africa: “I dreamed the sea-chest beneath me was a coffin lid, with beneath it Jacques’ face, lips drawn back from broken teeth” (219). Whether this was the last image of Jacques that the narrator remembered before his body was buried by a Khoekhoe woman is unclear; what remains beyond doubt is that the image is a clear reference to Jacques’s depiction of the exotic creature. Following the logic of this recurrent image, we may argue that Jacques has come to represent the kind of fate that he earlier depicted in his compelling and unsettling language of gestures; in other words, he has been forced to share the fate of the creature that he briefly embodied. Reacting to this dream, the narrator rationalizes that Jacques is, in fact, far away, “buried under stones, hands clutched around his ankles” (219), but this observation only serves to emphasize the boy’s enduring presence in the shape of the violent and unsettling image.

The question of how dysphoric emotions, such as shame and embarrassment, are experienced and transferred can be raised in the context of a later passage. During his voyage back to France, as his inadequately preserved specimens begin to decompose, the narrator reflects: “Each drawer of my wooden cabinet was filled with corruption and shame: all lost, all for nothing” (221). By this time, it seems, the narrator has realized the full extent of his failure, which he experiences in terms of shame: he is returning home with a set of rotten specimens, a large egg, and an improbable story about its origins. One way of interpreting shame, as expressed in this passage, is by viewing it in terms of embarrassment, understood as an emotion stemming from “a failure to cope successfully with a challenge” (Tomkins 2008: 351). Nonetheless, the curious juxtaposition of the two central words in this passage — “corruption and shame” — hints at interpretations that reach beyond the man’s failure as a scientist. The narrator’s reaction can be viewed as an expression of guilt that has its origins in his vague realization of indirect complicity in the atrocities committed by Venter and other Boers.

At this point, it is worth returning to Tomkins’s understanding of guilt as an emotion that directly stems from the affect of shame-humiliation. Even more interestingly from the point of view of this article, Tomkins also discusses an emotion related to guilt, which he identifies as vicarious shame. As defined by Tomkins, vicarious shame is the state of being shamed by what happens to others. He discusses vicarious shame as “at once a measure of civilization and a condition of civilization” (Tomkins, 2008: 409). Shame shows the extent to which we are invested in the values of the civilization to which we belong, but it also points to our ability to empathize with others. Referring to Tomkins, Bewes writes about vicarious shame as an experience of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion — of feeling implicated in a community whose values and beliefs one condemns. Bewes rightly points out that “it is only insofar as we are subjectively implicated in civilization that we can be ashamed by the ways in which it falls short” (2011: 22).

The notion of vicarious shame can be considered in the wider context of white racial emotions. In a recent psychological study, Patrick R. Grzanka, Keri A. Frantell, and Ruth E. Fassinger contrast shame with guilt, describing the former as “a more unpleasant and painful emotion […], targeting the entire self” (2020: 50) (as opposed to guilt, which is focused on one’s actions). The authors argue that people who experience shame “commonly use detachment or externalization to alleviate painful feelings endemic to shame” (2020: 51) as part of the attempt to disclaim individual responsibility for social and political injustice. While Grzanka, Frantell, and Fassinger’s study concentrated on white undergraduate students in the United States, the findings point to a psychological mechanism that transcends the sociopolitical setting considered by those researchers. The strategy of detachment is especially relevant in the context of the present discussion insofar as it may help to explain the elusiveness of shame in Rose-Innes’s story. In this interpretation, the narrator’s experience of vicarious shame triggers an attempt to detach himself from it by reformulating it in terms of his failure as a scientist. This kind of shame is more acceptable insofar as — for the larger part of the story — it is not presented as irrevocable. Indeed, until the story’s ending, the narrator entertains the vain hope that the egg (specifically, the creature it carries) offers a promise of future success. I now turn to the discussion of what is arguably the story’s most intriguing part — its ending.

Reading the story’s ending: The aporetic double movement of shame

As noted above, the structure of “Animalia Paradoxa” can be divided into three parts of unequal length: parts one and three are set in France, specifically Île-de-France in the autumn of 1792, while part two, the longest of the three, is a description of the narrator’s expedition to South Africa. The circular structure of the story emphasizes the narrator’s return not only to the same location but to the same situation, which is nothing short of dramatic: as the narrator is trying frantically to complete his collection, an angry mob is advancing, their torches ready to set fire to the orangery and the adjoining palace. It is in this moment of desperation and heightened expectancy that the narrator experiences his epiphanic vision; as if it were waiting for this moment, an animal is hatched from the egg — not a helpless being but a powerful and ominous creature. “Lizard-jawed, fish-scaled, coal-feathered, impossible” (222), the creature is perhaps closest to a dragon, but it is also evocative of the phoenix (included in Linnaeus’s section “Animalia Paradoxa”), born again amid the flames and the ashes (“It rises up again, on wings of smoke and fire” (222)).

The end of the story gives us an epiphanic-like moment in which the narrator is confronted with an overwhelming affect, which he identifies as something other than fear (“It is too late for fear” (222)). As is the case with the entire story, its ending gives us only subtle indications as to his feelings, but the description of the winged creature evokes shame in its reference to the state of being observed, or rather, exposed in one’s vulnerability to the gaze of the unknown creature. Indeed, it is significant that the most prominent feature of the phoenix-like creature is its eye:

It is a human eye, and every other kind besides. It is like no living thing, and yet contains all living things. It is animal and mineral and angel, and every being yet to be invented, all creatures of the coming age. (222)

Concentrated in its “giant eye” (222), the creature’s power over the narrator is absolute. Lying helpless on his back, awaiting his fate, the man is not only observed but also exposed by the gaze of an eye that seems to know both the past and the future.

Viewed in the context of the affective economy of “Animalia Paradoxa”, the last and most dramatic scene of Rose-Innes’s story may be interpreted as a representation of the narrator’s vulnerability, which has its origins in the awareness of being seen by the other. This sense of being observed and known is evocative of shame. As Bernard Williams has argued, “The basic experience connected with shame is that of being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong people, in the wrong condition” (1993: 78). While Williams connects shame with nakedness and sexuality, shame results from having one’s weakness exposed to the gaze of the other. In the narrator’s case, the weakness goes beyond his failure as a scientist, manifesting itself in the form of a more elemental frailty experienced by a human being who is faced with an event that he can neither control nor comprehend. As I have argued in the context of Sedgwick’s reaction to seeing the absence of the Twin Towers, the experience of strangeness can lead to shame when it shows the irrelevance of our attitude towards the object, exposing our limitations and weaknesses.

If we read the ending of “Animalia Paradoxa” against the background of the story’s second part, we may discover an irony that becomes visible on the last page: the huge egg transported to France from South Africa, instead of delivering its owner the promise of success (in other words, of transforming his shame into pride), has brought him a different, more profound sense of shame. The feeling of discomfiture experienced when watching Jacques’s enactment of the exotic creature has now given way to a more acute combination of shame and anxiety, so intense as to bring an end to the narrative. Indeed, the movement from a realist depiction of the world to myth conveys a liminal experience of coming face to face with a truth that defies expression — certainly not in the scientific and sceptical mode adopted by the narrator earlier in the story. In this way, Rose-Innes captures shame in its aporetic double movement; in other words, its contradictory tendency toward expression and concealment. Reminiscent of the mythical creature flying above the orangery, the story circles around the burning question of shame, only to terminate when — having adopted the mode of the myth — it captures this affect in its fiery intensity. The last scene can be viewed as a moment when shame suddenly escapes the mechanism of suppression, becoming an affect so powerful that it seems to have an agency of its own.

Conclusion: Shame in the context of post-apartheid South Africa

I have analysed how Rose-Innes’s “Animalia Paradoxa” expresses three emotions that Tomkins associated with shame: embarrassment, discomfiture, and guilt (also discussed as vicarious shame). While only embarrassment is identified by the narrator, discomfiture and guilt are experienced by him on a less conscious level. More subversive than shame, they are suppressed by the narrator, which, of course, does not mean that they lose any of their power; on the contrary, the suppression of those emotions leads to the narrator being overwhelmed by them, as described in the story’s epiphanic ending.

The narrator’s determined — even desperate — attempts to confront shame in its different guises can be considered against the sociopolitical background of post-apartheid South Africa. Among the writers who have written about shame are Antjie Krog and Rian Malan. ⁴ For Krog and Malan, shame results from the conflict between the awareness of their racial and social belonging on the one hand and their ideological stance and political convictions on the other. In the case of both writers, shame is closely connected with a sense of entrapment, as they confront the contradictions of condemning a culture to which they continue to belong.

While both Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) and Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart (1990) show the challenges inherent in the task of working through the tangled emotion of shame, they also point to the beneficial effect of confronting it, however difficult this process may be. The developmental potential of shame is emphasized by Kai Wiegandt in his discussion of Krog’s memoir. As Wiegandt argues, shame becomes an important step in “self-reform and for acknowledgment of collective political responsibility” (2017: 447). Another postcolonial scholar who has written about shame in a positive light is Elspeth Probyn, who, referring to Tomkins, points out that shame does not annihilate our interest in the object — on the contrary, it brings with itself the promise that this interest will continue beyond this negative emotion. Arguing that shame can lead to an experience of fragility, she points out that if this experience is acknowledged, it can become “a basis from which to reevalutate one’s existence” (2005: 64).

Compelling though it is, the recuperative logic outlined by Wiegandt and Probyn cannot be applied to Rose-Innes’s story, which does not make the connection between experiencing shame and fully acknowledging it — a necessary step to any attempts at self-re-evaluation. Instead of an emotional progression, the ending of the story gives us an epiphanic-like moment in which the narrator is faced with an overwhelming experience of shame. In this sense, the ending illustrates the ultimate failure of eradicating this emotion without openly confronting it. On a more positive note, this moment of acute vulnerability, in which the narrator is powerless to communicate, does not lead to the extinction of interest — the narrator watches the creature as it rises up into the sky, “on wings of smoke and fire” (222). Following Probyn’s revealing comment on shame and interest, it can be argued that what is described here is an enduring interest that refuses to be annihilated by shame. In this sense, the last scene also points to a desire for a connection with what remains unknown and cannot as yet be meaningfully accommodated. “Animalia Paradoxa” is certainly capable of creating this state of interest and confusion in the readers, as they are left with the challenging task of understanding the elusive but powerful emotions expressed in this story.