Dung beetle

The dung beetle is a small but telling presence in E. L. Doctorow's City of God, a creature that surfaces in two sharply contrasting contexts and, in doing so, binds together the novel's comic and apocalyptic registers. In one appearance it is a practical joke played on scripture; in another it is an instrument of eternal torment. Between these poles, the beetle belongs to a wider pattern of animal life—ants, birds, and other creatures—through which the novel explores questions of order, purpose, and the place of the humble in a cosmos that may or may not be governed by a benevolent hand.

The Beetle in the Ark List

The dung beetle first appears in a playful, mock-scriptural passage that reimagines the story of Noah. The narrator, riffing on the logistics of the ark, compiles a list of "Things Noah Would Have to Have Two Of," and the dung beetle is declared "Absolutely essential." The reasoning is both earthy and logical: with forty days and nights of rain plus a hundred and fifty of swollen waters, Noah and his menagerie would spend about six and a third months on board, living among camels, horses, lions, jackals, wild asses, goats, sheep, hedgehogs, boars, meerkats, caracals, wolves, warthogs, and jerboas. The sheer volume of animal waste would be overwhelming, and the narrator observes that one would know better than to shovel that stuff overboard, since when the waters receded it would be needed as topsoil. The punchline is that two dung beetles, even working through their generations, would face an impossible workload—so the list is amended to four. The passage is characteristic of the novel's irreverent, inventive engagement with biblical material, treating the ark not as a site of solemn salvation but as a practical problem of waste management, and elevating the lowly dung beetle to a position of genuine necessity in the divine plan.

The Beetle in the Imagined Hell

The beetle's second appearance is far darker, occurring in a long, furious speech by Thomas Pemberton, the Episcopal priest at the center of the novel's crisis of faith. In a passage of escalating grotesquerie, Pemberton imagines a Satan who breathes his foul waste, alive with squirmy larvae and dung beetles, over the damned, absorbing them into his hideous being. The vision is a catalog of the world's tyrants and killers—the gibbering, bug-eyed, teeth-gnashing asshole of the German national religion; the steely slit-eyed peasant shitbrain of the Russian revolutionary religion; the little colonialist bastard exterminator-king of the civilized Belgians; the stonefaced rouge-cheeked killer cretin of the South Asian jungles—along with the torturers of the banana republics, island tyrants of the Caribbean and Pacific seas, tribal thugs of Africa, and ethnic-cleansing goons of the Balkans, and their bankers, arms suppliers, and loyal legions of rapers, impalers, beheaders, bludgeoners, bayoneters, machine gunners, machete wielders, death squad kidnappers, crematoria designers, and slave camp administrators. In this hell, the dung beetle is no longer a useful recycler of waste but a component of the filth itself, a detail in a nightmare of eternal, conscious torment. The speech culminates in Pemberton's declaration that if such a hell existed, he could remain a priest—but as it is, he concludes, "we must remake You. If we are to remake ourselves, we must remake You, Lord." The beetle thus marks the outer limit of Pemberton's theological imagination, the point at which the comic and the horrific meet, and beyond which he can no longer believe in the God he serves.

The Beetle and the Novel's Ecology of Creatures

The dung beetle's two appearances belong to a broader pattern in City of God, in which the novel repeatedly turns to the animal world to think through questions of order, purpose, and community. The same narrator who jokes about Noah's beetles also watches ants in Central Park, hunkering down with children to observe the infinitesimal creatures, each not an eighth of an inch long, building an underground city. The ants, the narrator reflects, are brainless but purposive, disciplined, and possessed of a strong work ethic, each one a cell of a group brain, an invisible organ of thought beyond the capacity of any one of them to understand. The narrator speculates that if one could watch the random and unpredictable movement of great numbers of human beings in a city park in the same way, one might see the same pattern—the integrity of the individual will coexisting with a larger, unlocatable intelligence. The dung beetle, like the ant, is a creature of waste and labor, a being whose lowliness conceals a vital function in the economy of creation. In the ark passage, the beetle's work is literally essential to the survival of the world after the flood; in the hell passage, the same creature becomes a sign of what happens when that economy is perverted into eternal suffering. The contrast is the novel's own, between a cosmos in which even the humblest creature has a purpose and one in which purpose has collapsed into torment.

The Beetle as a Figure of the Divine

The dung beetle's double life in City of God also resonates with the novel's larger meditation on the nature of the divine. The ark passage treats the beetle as a necessary part of Noah's world, a creature whose lowly work makes possible the renewal of the earth. The hell passage, by contrast, imagines the beetle as part of Satan's foul being, a detail in a vision of a God who is either absent or monstrous. Between these two poles, the beetle functions as a kind of test case for Pemberton's faith: can the divine be found in the humblest, most waste-adjacent forms of life, or is the cosmos ultimately a place of filth and torment? The novel's answer is characteristically ambiguous, but the beetle itself remains a constant—a creature that appears whenever the text needs to think about the relationship between the lowly and the sacred, the comic and the terrible, the necessary and the damned. In this sense, the dung beetle is not merely a recurring image but a figure for the novel's own method, which finds the divine in the most unexpected places, including the dung heap and the ark.