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

Abstract

This article offers a close reading of Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Animalia Paradoxa” from the perspective of affect studies. The analysis of this short story aims to show the elusiveness of shame, which stems from the scarcity of detail regarding the psychological makeup and affective predisposition of its narrator. It is argued that elusiveness is closely connected with what can be called the aporetic double movement of shame, which both exposes and conceals this emotion, confronting the reader with the task of situating its movement in the context of the story’s historical setting and its sociopolitical dimension. The analysis of “Animalia Paradoxa” shows that the elusiveness of shame has its roots in the narrator’s attempts to suppress and detach himself from certain kinds of shame, most importantly vicarious shame, stemming from his sense of complicity in the atrocities that he witnesses. This dysphoric emotion, which is distinct from guilt, can be viewed against the background of South Africa, specifically the experience of white South Africans in the post-apartheid era.