other|matters

retread| On JM Coetzee’s Disgrace 21 October 2006

Retreads are quality posts from yesterweeks that are given a second run on Saturdays. This piece was originally posted by VARANGALI on 11 Apr 2006.

Early on in John M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (Penguin Books, 1999), the protagonist, Professor David Lurie, is asked to apologize for his affair with an 18-year old African student. David refuses. In a silent broadside against the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the atmosphere of forgiveness over justice it fostered, David refused to denounce his nature, his manly submission to eros.

Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious power behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat’s back and drove it out, and the city was cleansed. It worked because everyone knew how to read the ritual, including the gods. Then the gods died, and all of a sudden you had to cleanse the city without divine help. Real actions were demanded instead of symbolism. The censor was born, in the Roman sense. Watchfulness became the watchword: the watchfulness of all over all. Purgation was replaced by the purge.

Disgrace similarly refuses to ask its characters to be anything but themselves, and refuses to lighten the reader's moral discomfort with pathos or any mea culpa. Coetzee's characters are what they do, and are ultimately defined by their primal urges: eros, power, vengeance. South Africa is a playground for men at their worst, and the shift in power in the post-Apartheid era is from the rapist in the ivory tower to the rapist in the masses.

David Lurie is a second-rate professor and scholar of Romantic poetry, and a lover to many women: former wives, young students, tourists, exotic prostitutes. There is no need to justify this philandering: eros is undeniable. We must accept who we are, as he explains to his daughter Lucy. He offers her a story by way of explanation, of a dog that is beaten every time he tries to mate:

But at the deepest level I think it might have preferred being shot. It might have preferred that the options it was offered: on the one hand, to deny its nature, on the other, to spend the rest of its days padding about the living room, sighing and sniffing the cat and getting portly.

This exchange takes place after David has resigned his university post after the affair with his student, and has moved in with his daughter Lucy on her rural farm. Lucy is South Africa herself, an experiment that defied nature and had to be punished for it: a white hippie seeking to live in black South Africa, without the protection borne to the privileged race in the cities. She is ultimately raped by strangers, as a power play orchestrated by her African tenant, and as the lightning rod of an oppressor.

Lucy's clarity on the issue is searing. Refusing to press charges and understanding both the political and visceral aspects of the assault, Lucy knows that she is paying for who she is.

But isn't there another way of looking at it, David? What if… what if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying?

With David still unable to comprehend the shift in power that has left him powerless in seeking justice, Lucy places him squarely among the perpetrators in his ignorance and arrogant sense of entitlement: South Africa is an assault victim that has simply passed from one rapist to the next.

It is as if you have chosen deliberately to sit in a corner where the rays of the sun do not shine. I think of you as one of the three chimpanzees, the one with his paws over his eyes.

David's capitulation is finally complete not when he attempts an awkward apology to his lover-student’s parents, but when he realizes that nature itself has stopped bestowing her fortune upon him. After decades of choosing among a bevy of beautiful women, David has to settle for adultery with a dumpy old simpleton.

His thoughts go to Emma Bovary strutting before the mirror after her first big afternoon. I have a love!. I have a lover! sings Emma to herself. Well, let poor Bev Shaw go home and do some signing too. And let him stop calling her poor Bev Shaw. If she is poor, he is bankrupt.

The ascendance of Lucy's African tenant, conversely, is complete by the end of the novel. The conclusion is deceptively simple and logical, yet horrific in its moral import and human consequences.

Disgrace is ultimately an illiberal novel. With nature trumping positive laws of reciprocity and truth prioritized over sentiment, Coetzee's characters are not willful actors creating their own histories. Rather, they are like bit parts in an ancient Greek drama, following their passions to their logical ends – a part of nature's cycle of purgation. That the reader is subjected to this is both a privilege and a harrowing reminder of our fragility as moral creatures.