The “unimaginable border” and bare life in Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy

Abstract

This article offers a consideration of the figure of the feral child in Australian writer Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy (2009), a novel based on stories circulating in the media about children raised by dogs in post-perestroika Russia. The book was praised for its exploration of the liminal space occupied by its protagonist, Romochka, the ecocritical potential in the idea of ferality, and its grimly realistic portrayal of both Romochka’s privations and the comfort offered by the company and loyalty of dogs. I read the novel less optimistically, through Giorgio Agamben’s conception of “bare life” and the metaphorical instrument of its production, the anthropological machine as described in The Open: Man and Animal. Romochka is excluded from political life and from legal protection, yet is subject to state intervention. Further, I argue that the novel is engaged in Australian and international debates about people excluded from political life and from the protection of the law, such as the homeless and refugees, who are nonetheless exposed to state power and surveillance.

Eva Hornung’s sixth novel, Dog Boy (2009), which won the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award, focuses on a feral child named Romochka, who after being abandoned in an unheated Moscow apartment in late autumn is nurtured by a pack of half-wild dogs. The novel was written after extensive research by Hornung into dog packs and is based on the lives of street children raised by dogs in Moscow, such as Ivan Mishukov (Armbruster, 2014: 106; Cunningham, 2009: 171). Romochka, whose name Hornung chose because it was a Russian diminutive of Roman and connoted Romulus (Bogle, 2009), trails the mother dog, Mamochka, and the rest of the pack to their lair on the city’s outskirts. He survives the winter by being nursed by Mamochka. The first half of the novel portrays Romochka’s existence as deprived of human contact, nutrition, education, and light. As compensation, Romochka is comforted and sustained by members of the pack. His dog “family” is relentlessly loyal. The narrative in the second half of the book shifts focus when Mamochka brings home a baby, who Romochka names Puppy. When spring arrives, Puppy, by then a toddler, is captured by the authorities and taken to the Anton Makarenko Children’s Centre, ¹ where he dies of pneumonia. Sections from the latter parts of the novel are focalized through a paediatrician, Natalya Ivanovna, and a child psychologist, Dmitry Patushenko. The latter parts of the book examine the feral child as an object of study and scientifically-observed differences between humans and animals.

Reviews of Dog Boy focused on Romochka as living between human and canine worlds (Bogle, 2009; Womack, 2010) and on the book’s grounding in Ivan Mishukov’s story (Armbruster, 2014; Burnside, 2010). Some critics discounted the latter parts of the novel on the basis that Patushenko and Ivanovna repeat observations about Romochka that the reader has already made (Womack, 2010). In the only scholarship on the text, Greg Garrard takes up the idea of ferality in Dog Boy as occurring in a liminal space. Garrard’s chapter concentrates on the potential of the feral as a threshold state: in scholarship, between the new disciplines of Animal Studies and Ecocriticism (2014: 242); that is, on the border of the sciences and the humanities; as interpolated between the human and the animal; and as possessing a “subversive energy” because of its resistance to dualities (2014: 242). According to Garrard, Hornung’s text about a feral child is exemplary on the basis of its ethics. Through the book’s depiction of Romochka’s existence as both canine and human, it seeks to challenge human–animal binaries through portraying people and dogs as inter-differentiated (Garrard, 2014: 255). ² The implication is that dogs and humans are groups of equivalent cultural and social value.

While Dog Boy explores long-held distinctions between humans and animals, and the liminal space Romochka occupies, I argue that the novel also notably depicts the consequences of transgressing borders. These borders include the boundary between humans and animals, which is superimposed on invisible yet palpable physical delineations in the novel between the city and its outskirts, the homeless, bomzhi, and citizens, or “house people” as Romochka calls them. The book’s emphasis on the transgression, surveillance, and policing of borders, and the repeated images of a homeless woman’s face which has a scar from forehead to chin, emphasize divisions and demarcations and the resulting retribution for crossing or dwelling on boundaries. Therefore, although the novel is set in Moscow, it metaphorically explores and critiques contemporary Australian concerns with the integrity and defence of borders.

Romochka’s occupation of an in-between space can be interpreted through Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben traces the genealogy of an ancient figure, homo sacer or sacred man, the person who “can be killed and yet not sacrificed”, who in modernity is excluded from and captured within “the political order” (Agamben, 1998: 8−9). Bare life entails political exclusion, lack of legal protection, and simultaneous subjection to sovereign authority, a form of existence that is also liminal in relation to sovereign power. The state of exception, an important term in Agamben’s work, is the suspension of the law by the sovereign agency until stability can be restored in which “everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life” (Agamben, 1998: 9). Bare life, a subject’s biopolitical existence, is the primary object of sovereign rule, while the state of exception is “the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rest[s]” (Agamben, 1998: 9). While Agamben is arguing for bare life as the universal condition of citizens in modernity and maintains that this state is ubiquitous among modern states, I use Agamben’s formulations of bare life and contemporary political systems to interrogate Romochka’s position. Romochka presents an extreme case. He is outside the political sphere, abandoned by and yet subject to the state. Other characters in the novel are similarly vulnerable, yet Romochka’s estrangement from citizenship is stark. Further, in The Open: Man and Animal (2004), Agamben addresses distinctions between humans and animals, in particular the “production” of bare life through a mechanism that he terms “the anthropological machine”. Given that Romochka is ostracized as a consequence of becoming canine and for his occupation of a threshold between people and animals, the anthropological machine provides a means of reading and generalizing his situation.

Hornung’s fiction is notable for its attention to ethical questions of Australian and international import, particularly around the predicament and treatment of refugees. The novel she published before Dog Boy, entitled The Marsh Birds (2005), is about a child who flees Baghdad for Damascus and waits in a mosque for his family to meet him. Stories from Mahjar (2003) trace the lives of migrants to Australia. ³ The emphasis on boundaries in Dog Boy coincides with an Australian preoccupation with the surveillance and patrol of national borders and an acknowledged change in policy towards refugees. This policy entails punitive prevention in border control: punishment of refugees who attempt to arrive in Australia by boat, by detention of asylum seekers in offshore immigration centres, an approach which has been observed since the mid-1990s by criminologists engaged in studying Australia’s penal policies (Feeley and Simon, 1992; Weber, 2007: 77). Dog Boy is interested in the excoriating consequences of demarcations between inside and outside, both for those excluded from the city or political life and, to a lesser extent, for those who are citizens.

The following section will outline the idea of the anthropological machine as a generator of “bare life”. Despite the novel’s setting in Russia, it emerges from a postcolonial Australian literary context. It “draw[s] critical attention” to the complexities of “liberal democratic ideals” and how “they operate to shore up a national and global imperial status quo” (Sharrad, 2012: 6). The novel’s engagement with these questions is evident in its portrayal of the city’s fringes as a space where the rule of law is suspended. Through its depiction of the lawlessness of Moscow’s outskirts, it gestures towards postcolonial states where the rule of law is weak, or applied differently to those who are not judged to be citizens, such as refugees. Therefore, the application of Agamben’s theoretical framework to postcolonial literary texts is relevant, as is Russell West-Pavlov’s (2011) discussion of lines and borders in contemporary Australian fiction. I will therefore examine the borders in Hornung’s novel, as well as the novel’s preoccupation with territory, lines, boundaries, and inscribed and surveilled bodies. The consequences of inclusion, exclusion, and legal abandonment will then be explored, followed by an examination of the relevance of this reading of Hornung’s novel to other postcolonial Australian novels that prominently feature animals.

The anthropological machine and the “unimaginable border”

The critical response to Dog Boy registers the protagonist’s positioning on a boundary between dogs and people and between wild and tame. Greg Garrard (2014), in “Ferality Tales” uses Agamben’s The Open to examine the notion of the feral in Dog Boy. He references Agamben’s discussion of Linnaeus’s attempts to classify within the species homo sapiens “a variant”, the “wild child” or enfant sauvage: children, such as Victor of Aveyron, presumed to have been raised by animals in the late eighteenth century (Agamben, 2004: 30). Agamben argues that these children, the response to them on the part of men of the Ancien Régime and the “attempts to recognize themselves in them and ‘humanize’ them reveals an awareness of the precariousness of the human” (2004: 30). What Agamben suggests is that “enfants sauvages” are “messengers of man’s inhumanity” not only because they demonstrate how easy it is for children to become wild or feral, but also because the existence of wild children suggests that there is very little delineating tame from wild, man from animal: that the border between the two ways of being is porous.

Hornung’s novel suggests an easy crossing over from the human world to a canine one, a particular affinity on the part of dogs for humans and humans for dogs. When Romochka first follows Mamochka to the dogs’ lair, he

wriggled himself close, buried his cold nose in the mother dog’s hair and sticky skin, and then the hot milk was his. It slid, rich and delicious, down his throat and into his aching belly. […] After a while his hands warmed up and he reached for her damp belly and stroked her with his fingers as he drank, feeling out her scabs and scars and playing his fingers along her smooth ribs. She sighed and laid down her head. (Hornung, 2009: 17) ⁴

Romochka is so hungry and cold that he does not hesitate to nurse from a mother dog. He also seeks warmth and comfort. In exchange for milk, he strokes Mamochka. Her “sigh[ing] and [laying] down her head” implies that to be touched by a human child is somehow a relief to her. Through Hornung’s description of this first interaction, she asserts that this kind of bond, lactating bitch with human child, is “natural”, longed for by Romochka and Mamochka, and that a desire for this closeness which is also reflected in the rhyme of their names, lies latent within dogs and children. Part of Romochka’s longing appears to be the yearning for a mother, kinship, and family. Romochka’s canine family tries to protect him from wild dogs, gangs of skinheads, and the authorities. In this moment, though, the book suggests that some unacknowledged interspecies connection comes to the surface and is expressed. The expression of something buried seems particular to dogs and children; most of the other animals in the novel are prey. In addition, the integration of Romochka into the pack and his willingness to feed from a dog demonstrates the extent to which being human is conditional on enculturation, a process that happens by degrees. Puppy, the baby adopted by Mamochka later in the novel, walks on all fours and is without language. These characteristics are associated with homo ferus, Linnaeus’s observed “biological” variant (Garrard, 2014: 243).

For Agamben, the human–animal distinction has political consequences and is achieved by means of the “anthropological machine” (Agamben, 2004: 37). This is the mechanism by which humans are excluded from humanity or political participation and are concomitantly subjected to sovereign agency. In The Open, the machine is conceived of as emerging from and constituting biological, philosophical, and anthropological discourses, such as Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae (1735) to both distinguish the “true” human or citizen from the subhuman. Further, the anthropological machine situates the human and the animal in relation to “exclusion” and “inclusion”, terms which pertain to political exclusion and simultaneous inclusion in the sphere of sovereign power:

[Modern and Pre-modern] machines are able to function only by establishing a zone of indifference at their centers, within which — like a “missing link” which is always lacking because it is already virtually present — the articulation between human and animal, man and non-man, speaking being and living being, must take place. Like every space of exception, this zone is, in truth, perfectly empty, and the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew. What would thus be obtained, however, is neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and excluded from itself — only a bare life (Agamben, 2004: 38, emphasis in original).

The “anthropological machine” is the mechanism whereby “bare life” is produced: the mechanistic, indifferent means by which humans are rendered less than fully human. The “missing link” is the link between humans and animals, through the idea of the “ape-man” or through homo ferus, the man who crucially lacks language. The feral child therefore is the intermediate case, existing at an articulation or caesura between human and animal, man and non-man. To the workings of the anthropological machine Agamben applies the term caesurae, used in prosody, derived from the Latin verb caedere, “to cut off” and referring to the place in a line of verse where the metrical flow is cut off or stopped (Greene and Cushman, 2012: 174). The machine is a metaphor whose workings involve “caesurae” and whose rearticulations “are always dislocated and displaced anew”, making the state of being “truly human”, or a citizen with rights, fundamentally unstable.

While the anthropological machine is constituted through discourse, its political implications are wide-ranging. Political exclusion at the border between human and nonhuman is through the exceptional operation of the law. As Calarco argues,

[t]he locus and stakes of the human–animal distinction are deeply political and ethical. For not only does the distinction create the opening for exploitation of non-human animals and others considered not fully human […] but it also creates the conditions for contemporary biopolitics. (Calarco, 2008: 171, emphasis in original)

That is, the implications of the caesurae between “humans” and “nonhumans” create estrangement, not simply of animals from humans, but also of people from other people in political terms.

The exploration of the border between dogs and people in Dog Boy is made explicit in the first few pages of the book when Hornung writes: “A lone boy crossed a border that is, usually, impassable — not even imaginable” (15). The literal border is Romochka’s entrance into the dogs’ lair from the human world of his apartment and the streets of Moscow. The narrative discourse suggests that this “border” between dog and human is generally impassable, but that Romochka traverses it. A significant part of the novel’s project is an attempt to depict what is on the other side of the boundary: the dogs’ world. The novel is the means by which this passing from one world to the other is both imagined on the part of Hornung and made imaginable to a reader. Romochka “passes” across a “border” as a dog and later as a boy, as when he acts and speaks like a child to the doctors at the children’s centre, but feels canine. Dog Boy, then, troubles the border between human and canine, but importantly Romochka’s traverse has political consequences. Becoming canine results in political exclusion: being regarded at best as homeless, a Bomzh (literally without fixed abode) (Smith, 2007: 254). ⁵ A woman says to him, “Filth! Bomzh! Animal!” (89) as though these terms are equivalent. Romochka repeats these words to himself, which stress his status as an outsider, and signal his recognition of what he has become. To be an animal is to be homeless and filthy; to be outside the sphere of civilization. Romochka’s exclusion from the realm of citizenship is legible, and his estrangement from the legal inhabitants of the city exemplifies the treatment of people who share his outsider status, such as undocumented immigrants.

An important aspect of the dogs’ world pertains to the limited role of spoken language. Romochka soon determines that to be canine is to integrate the senses differently, to rely on body language, gesture, and touch. Early in his time in the dogs’ lair, Romochka tries to tell his litter mates a story:

“Once upon a time there were some dogs. Very good dogs who always brushed their teeth” […] he was very pleased with the words falling into that dark space, pleased with how much words were changing everything. But just then the puppies behind lost interest. (25)

Words, here, have little power; they change nothing. It is impossible for Romochka to keep the puppies’ attention with a series of sentences. The dogs’ lives are not built on stories, on “once upon a time”, but on other rituals: the ritual of the older dogs’ return to the den with food for the puppies, for example: “Everything was ritual” (27), the narrator in Dog Boy asserts. The irony is that Hornung uses language to evoke the rich sensorium of Romochka’s canine life, to describe smell and touch, and to delineate Romochka’s sense of inadequacy that accompanies his realization that he cannot smell as well as the dogs. Hornung explores one of the reiterated differences between humans and animals: the lack of language on the part of animals. She uses language to evoke the border between the species, yet through detailed sensual description of odours, touch, and sound. As the book progresses, its focus shifts to explore the political ramifications of Romochka’s status.

Closed paths and inscriptions

Postcolonial fiction can be analysed through Agamben’s conceptions of the state of exception and bare life. While Dog Boy is set in Europe, it portrays spaces that bear a close resemblance to postcolonial spaces of exception, where geographical zones are excluded from the rule of law and sovereign power is not limited by statutes. The idea of bare life has been used to read postcolonial texts, such as Kim Scott’s Benang (West-Pavlov, 2011) and Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying (Knepper, 2012). Inclusion and exclusion of people can be mapped onto physical spaces.

West-Pavlov (2011) refers to a line drawn on a beach described in Watkin Tench’s 1788, his journal of the first years of the settlement at Sydney Cove. The line was inscribed by the English in an initial meeting between a landing party of English soldiers and the indigenous Eora people (Tench, 1996: 45). It served as a boundary to keep the Eora people at a safe distance, yet allow for communication. According to West-Pavlov, the line in the sand, “takes on the character of an inaugural gesture in which inside and outside, symbolically, are marked out” (2011: 6). It is the original act on the part of colonists to designate who is inside, and where the other, in this case the Eora people, belong (West-Pavlov, 2011). While Agamben’s conception of bare life arises from European history and particularly from the work of German jurist Carl Schmitt, West-Pavlov argues that exclusion and inclusion are integral components of the juridical workings of postcolonial states (2011: 2). Agamben states that Schmitt’s doctrine “implies a zone that is excluded from law and that takes the shape of a ‘free and juridically empty space’ in which sovereign power no longer knows the limits fixed by the nomos as the territorial order” (1998: 36). Nomos here, or law, becomes “unfixed” in certain “free and juridically empty spaces”. West-Pavlov suggests that these spaces bear a resemblance to the terra nullius of colonial Australia. More recently, physical spaces have been legally excluded from Australian jurisdiction. In 2002, in an effort to stop asylum seekers arriving by boat on small islands close to the continent, the Australian government deemed that certain islands were not included in the Migration Act and refugees landing there would not be afforded legal rights (Banham, 2002). These excised zones have been analysed through Agamben’s conception of bare life by scholars such as Anja Schwarz and Justine Lloyd, who see excised or “buffer” zones as a means of criminalizing refugees by implying that their subjectivity is “‘dangerous’, ‘polluting’ or ‘criminal’” (Schwarz and Lloyd, 2007: 252−53). Border spaces, where the law is suspended, are in evidence in Hornung’s novel.

Hornung’s evocation of Romochka’s biopolitical existence has ramifications beyond the novel’s setting in Moscow. Boundaries, territories, and “closed paths” are important motifs throughout Dog Boy. The idea of territory and the marking out of territory is portrayed first in relation to the dog clan, who mark out an area for Romochka and the puppies to play. With time, Romochka develops an “awareness of territory that was almost unconscious” (45). For dogs, rules and rituals govern behaviour around territory: Mamochka never crosses the “closed paths” of a larger clan (45). These closed paths serve as boundaries that exclude Romochka’s pack and the (canine) regulations around these borders are well-defined; in fact, the rules around territory are a form of canine law. Human territories and zones of influence emerge as being important as the novel progresses. The emphasis on territory suggests that territorial markings are somehow as innate to people as they are to dogs. The inner, more prosperous parts of the city are difficult for Romochka to enter and traverse. When he and one of the dogs in his pack, White Sister, catch the subway and end up in a wealthy area, they have crossed an invisible line. After being asked for papers by the militzia, ⁶ Romochka and White Sister try to run away. For Romochka, the inner, prosperous areas of the city, occupied by “house people” rather than bomzhi, are closed (127).

The consequences of transgressing physical boundaries, especially the inner part of the city, are serious. On this occasion, Romochka is captured by the militzia and transported to a police station. While imprisoned, Romochka hears the leader of the unit discussing wild children: “‘Feral kids are worse than rabid dogs. Worse than adults too, and they reckon there’s millions. Never solve anything unless we get rid of them. Put it down, I say’” (135). This expository line of dialogue about the attitude to feral children on the part of the militzia reveals that because of his homelessness and lack of a family, Romochka is regarded as only worthy of being “put down”. By virtue of having crossed a border into a privileged area of the city and because he has left the sphere of the civilized and become feral, he is considered beyond help. The scenes when Romochka is held in a local lockup for days reveal how few rights he possesses. At the same time, these scenes depict his agency. Romochka’s dog boy is also a performance. He kept “within the boundaries of dog self and never let on that he heard [the militzia]”, while longing “for true doghood”, which would enable him to “understand only their bodies, not their words” (137).

Romochka is burdened with language and knowledge. Having half-inhabited a canine consciousness, Romochka idealizes that way of being, a state in which he would have an understanding only of gesture and body language rather than of the officers’ “names, and their kids’ names” (137). Occupying the threshold between human and canine worlds is depicted as burdensome, exposing Romochka to danger in the form of the militzia, but more significantly to knowledge. While Agamben’s homo sacer is without agency, Hornung’s dog boy is portrayed as possessing a complex yet sympathetic subjectivity.

In Hornung’s novel, a “free and juridically empty space” that is not literally empty exists on the outskirts of Moscow where the dogs live. This space is one where sovereign power is not limited by a legal code and where people living there, or the homeless, are pestered and worse by the militzia. In the book, the militzia are a corrupt and mercurial arm of the state, rather than a force for order. In the zone where Romochka lives with the dogs near “Svalka”, the largest landfill in Europe, ⁷ the militzia “charged in now and then, demolished everything, arrested or robbed the people and killed the dogs; then, in a day or two, the village would be rebuilt” (44). The people living on the edge of Svalka draw their living from it, as do Romochka and the dogs in the early parts of the book. The illegality of people’s dwellings exposes them to violence and arbitrary treatment, but the space around the garbage dump remains “free” in a sense. As Romochka observes: “the village and the forest immediately behind it was all open trails. No clan could close it” (44). There is a direct parallel here in Romochka’s thinking between humans and dogs, who both form clans. Neither can fully “close” the forest or the village, meaning neither humans nor dogs can restrict access to these places or control what happens there. ⁸

Lines and borders are important not simply in the physical city: they are also inscribed on the bodies of characters. When Romochka is captured by a skinhead gang and tortured, they tattoo the word “собака”, meaning dog, onto his chest (275). These scenes, which are some of the bleakest in the novel, again reveal Romochka’s vulnerability: the boys who capture Romochka and torture him do so because they see him as other and because the zone he inhabits is on the city’s fringes and outside the law. In Romochka’s estimation: “House boys hated bomzh boys so this was going to be a clan thing” (169). Bomzhi and house people belong to different clans; the territory of house boys excludes the homeless. Romochka’s branding with the word “dog” implies that his position in relation to the house boys’ “clan” is always outside. Further, there is no possibility of recourse to the law; Romochka relies on his “clan” for rescue.

Other people in the novel are similarly inscribed. Pievitza, who lives in the shanties on the edge of Svalka, is “horrifically disfigured by the scar of a deep knife or axe wound that had cut through her brow above one eye, through her nose, and down through her lips and her chin”. Her face is cut into two halves and the scar “makes her look as though she is smiling” (Hornung, 2009: 278). Pievitza is described as both beautiful and irreparably damaged, her grin a measure of her sadness — she loses her daughter, Irena — and a clownish mask. The scar serves as a metaphor for the costs of regulating the boundaries between those who live inside and outside the city, and between humans and animals. Romochka and Pievitza both bear the scars which result from and further their marginalization. Pievitza’s face is marked by an act of violence, just as Romochka’s chest is inscribed as a consequence of his dwelling outside the city and civilization. The borders in Dog Boy — whether people belong inside or outside — are mapped onto the characters’ skins.

Paternalism, surveillance, and policing of borders

The human–animal border within humanity is a site subject to surveillance and intervention. In the novel, this border is explored through explicit discussion of the feral child as an object of study. Dr Dmitry Patushenko references the study of children raised by dogs when Puppy, the younger boy also nursed by Mamochka, is captured: “This was a frontier […] The human animal: a living manifestation of a failed attempt to cross over that great divide. […] He found himself horrified, yet hopeful that the ‘raised by dogs’ part would prove verifiable” (197). For Dmitry, the feral child is on a “frontier” and is a “human animal”. Like the militzia who keep Romochka locked up, Dmitry feels “horrified” at the sight of the feral child. The occupation of a liminal space by Puppy (who is renamed Marko by Dmitry and Natalya) inspires a visceral reaction, which ultimately prompts Dmitry’s decision to separate Romochka from the dogs. Moreover, Dmitry’s observation that the child is “a living manifestation of a failed attempt to cross over that great divide” signals his beliefs about the relationships between humans and animals. Dmitry values scientific observation, the distancing achieved by scientific language and method, which is only possible for humans.

An anxiety about the border between those who live outside the city and those who are citizens is dramatized in the latter parts of the Dog Boy. Romochka observes the necessity of hiding aspects of himself which would mean that he were placed in the first category especially in relation to his visits to the children’s centre to visit Puppy/Marko: “[b]eing a dog had kept him in that cell as Belov’s begging tool. Being a child now seemed to keep him free” (217). To be a child is to be more distant from bare life than to be a dog, but the Children’s Centre, like Foucault’s invocation of Bentham’s panopticon, uses hidden cameras throughout to observe the children’s behaviour. Children are both objects of scientific interest and subject to the paternalistic efforts of doctors and child psychologists: the aim is to make them “normal”, so that they can enter the city as citizens rather than as damaged orphans. Their presence in the centre is critical to their rehabilitation. Children in the centre are microchipped, enabling them to be tracked if they escape. Patushenko explains this to Romochka by showing him “a small disc”. He says, “‘We put one of these inside Marko’s body. It sends a signal, like a little beeping you can’t hear. If he got lost the militzia could find him wherever he goes, just by following the signal’” (223). In a similar way, once Romochka attracts the attention of Dmitry and Natalya and they decide to rescue him from the dogs, the city itself becomes a panopticon, since Romochka is hunted by the militzia who use dogs and insert a tracking disc in a clan dog’s neck.

Agamben argues that the modern citizen is “a two-faced being, the bearer both of subjection to sovereign power and of individual liberties” (1998: 125). The novel goes further than this, depicting not only the risks to citizens of sovereign power, but also the extent to which people are implicated in its machinations. While Natalya and Dmitry are not surveilled in the same way as wards of state in the children’s centre and are not under threat, they exercise forms of self-regulation. Dmitry is careful about whom he attaches himself to, trying to select children for the centre he runs “with clinical detachment” (201). Natalya disciplines her body with gymnastics and attempts to mould the children in the centre in her image by inducing the girls to take part in her classes (202). For them, Romochka’s existence is a reminder of how easy it is to be cast out, as well as a challenge: they want to know if he can be rehabilitated. Their decision to separate him from the dogs culminates in their urging of the militzia to capture him. There is a sense of panic and danger around the idea that a child could live outside civilization with dogs. The militzia use a cook at an Italian restaurant, Laurentia, who is the victim of human traffickers (99), to poison the dogs in an act which stresses that Romochka’s life is bare and that the dogs are expendable. Natalya and Dmitry are therefore implicated in an inhumane act, which Romochka interprets as the murder of his family. While the couple would appear to be independent, they are enmeshed in the ideology and workings of the state.

The final scene in the novel suggests one of the costs of crossing the human–animal border. It depicts Romochka after having been brought to Natalya and Dmitry’s apartment and having been shaved, cleaned, and drugged. In an effort to make amends for having killed his dog family, Natalya and Dmitry bring three of Mamochka’s puppies from the dogs’ den and give them to Romochka:

His breathing stills and he stands limp at the window for a while, his eyes huge and dark in a white face. Then he turns swiftly and, bending down to the puppies, bites through each of their skulls in turn.

He has chosen to stay. (290)

One interpretation of this scene is that through crushing the puppies’ skulls, Romochka is acknowledging that his dog nature cannot survive with Natalya and Dmitry. Mamochka killed her puppies in a brutal winter, because they could not have endured; Romochka’s act echoes hers. In effect, he is doing away with his dog self, is deciding to “stay”, meaning deciding to stay human. Further, he is acknowledging that he must — in order to be human — exercise forms of self-regulation, even if these seem extreme. To become part of humanity is to violently police the “caesura” within the self; it is ironic that Romochka does this through what might be considered an animalistic act. The regulation of borders between animals and humans, wild and civilized, and city and fringes is depicted as violent.

Besides the emphasis on borders, Hornung’s novel portrays what could be described as canine culture, and evokes its sensual and embodied experiences. The book explores not only the privations of dwelling on a border and the ramifications of living a bare existence, but also the richness of what is “on the other side”. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Hornung chose to use the story of Ivan Mishukov as the basis for the book and to set it in the city where, as a child, he survived several winters in the company of dogs. The pack is maintained to ensure its members’ survival in a hostile environment that features boundaries which are violently policed. But the book examines more laudatory aspects of the pack’s life as well. Early in the novel, Mamochka is on heat and all of the other dogs “lingered over her and followed her around the lair, savouring it” (55). Although Romochka can’t smell Mamochka’s odour, he knows that something has shifted and when Mamochka and Black Dog mate and do nothing else for several days, Romochka

felt the pressure of an obscure happiness. He watched in tune with the other dogs, who were lying with him around the edges of the dance. There was no envy. A serious satisfaction hung in the air, and in this he half guessed that they all, himself included, had worked and hunted, for this; and that with Mamochka and Black Dog’s dance their summer was fulfilled (55−56)

The dogs form a community in which mating provokes “no envy” and where the collective effort of finding food and eating it culminates in an act which will ensure the clan’s survival. While Hornung’s portrayal of the dogs is idealized in this scene (wouldn’t Mamochka be attracting attention from dogs from all over the region?), the “obscure happiness” Romochka feels is pleasure that arises from the fact that each member of the community contributes to the clan’s existence. The same idea of community is important in the continuity of the clan in a particularly bitter winter, when Romochka has to stay home in the lair and the dogs bring food back for him. When he nurses from Mamochka, he “suck[s] a mouthful […] and kiss[es] it into a sibling’s lapping mouth. They wove around expectant, when he was drinking” (68). Romochka is attuned to the bodies of his “brothers” and “sisters” and while they bring him food from outside, he feeds them mouthfuls of milk to keep them alive. Of course, not all of the interactions between the dogs are positive; there are instances of jealousy and rivalry. It is notable that Dog Boy focuses not simply on the harsh consequences of policing boundaries, but presents an imagined “other side” of the human–animal border.

Border control and surveillance are nonetheless important in Dog Boy’s narrative. This concern in the novel coincides with Australian efforts to police national borders. The treatment of asylum seekers through incarceration and other inhumane practices, such as turning boats back to their places of origin, and the implementation of new anti-terror legislation, are strategies apparently inaugurated by the drawing of the line on the sand in 1788, and which have continued in postcolonial Australia. These strategies result in the exclusion of people from political participation and from ordinary legal protection, yet include them under sovereign agencies and bureaucratic apparatuses. Hornung’s novel directly engages these contemporary Australian preoccupations through its emphasis on surveillance, territory, and closed paths, and its images of inscribed bodies. Further, the novel stresses the embodied consequences of violence inflicted on those who are deemed to belong outside, or on those for whom paternalistic efforts towards integration are made.

Reading Hornung’s novel using bare life and the anthropological machine as a theoretical framework provides an approach to other recent Australian novels, many of which have been published since J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Elizabeth Costello (2003), and feature animals prominently in the title, narrative, or as metaphors. ⁹ Charlotte Wood’s recently published book, The Natural Way of Things (2015), which won the Prime Minister’s Literary Prize in 2016, is an allegory in which women are imprisoned on a remote outback property and kill rabbits to survive. The novel directly engages ideas around bare life and the anthropological machine. Evie Wyld’s (2013) All the Birds, Singing also involves a woman who is kept captive by a landowner on a remote Western Australian farm. Characters in these novels, like Romochka, reside in a place where they are not accorded legal protection, in part because of the remoteness of the Australian bush, and are simultaneously fearful of the interventions of the state.

Dog Boy is an exploration of what it is like to live estranged from any form of political power and exposed to violence. Its focus on a child whose closest bond is with dogs throws the relationships between humane animals and animalistic people into relief. Romochka’s dog life results, in part, in his othering, yet is his greatest source of comfort. The complexity of a life that from the outside appears spare and deprived calls into question judgements and preconceptions about those who live on the literal or metaphorical edges of modern cities. More significantly, the novel suggests the costs of living in modernity, which entails surveillance, the policing of borders, and being implicated in violent interventions conducted by the state.