When Disgrace was first published in 1999 its depiction of an incident of rape and violence perpetrated by black South Africans upon white civilians provoked furore within South African political circles. The African National Congress accused J.M. Coetzee of exploiting racist stereotypes, whilst Thabo Mbeki – South Africa’s second post-apartheid president – spoke out in defence of what he saw as a negative portrayal of his country, saying that “South Africa is not only a place of rape.”
That same year Coetzee, a South African by birth, was awarded the Man Booker Prize. Disgrace, as well as The Life and Times of Michael K, was to make Coetzee the first writer to win the Booker Prize twice, setting a new record in the history of the award. Ten years on from its publication, Disgrace has stood the test of time, making its way into university syllabuses and remaining a regular on the shelves of bookshop around the world.
Synopsis
The novel opens on a pragmatic note; ‘For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.’
Told through the literary device of a third person limited narrative, the reader is introduced to David Lurie, a communications professor at the fictional Cape Technical College. Lurie leads a quiet life of restrained and abstract passion, visiting a female escort on Thursday afternoons in order to satisfy his sexual desire.
The underlying question of his existence is set out early on by the narrator; ‘He is in good health, his mind is clear ... He lives within his income, within his temperament, within his emotional means. Is he happy?’ The answer to this question comes thus; ‘By most measurements, yes, he believes he is [happy]. However, he has not forgotten the last chorus of Oedipus: Call no man happy until he is dead.’
Like Sophocles’ Oedipus, Lurie’s fall from grace is not far away. His comfortably mediocre life begins to change when the escort disappears and he is forced to look for sexual satisfaction elsewhere. He starts up an affair with a student, despite an age gap of thirty years, and finds himself falling in love. Although she initially succumbs to his advances, she eventually reports their relationship to the educational authorities. As the resulting scandal leads to his expulsion from academia, Lurie decides to leave Cape Town and seek refuge on his daughter’s isolated smallholding in the Eastern Cape.
A Politics of Sex and Violence
One of the dominant themes of Disgrace is that of abusive sexual relations, a form of violence exclusively initiated in the novel by men. The most immediate example of male violence in Disgrace is the rape of Lurie’s daughter, Lucy. Herself a long-standing lesbian, Lucy speaks of the inherently dominant nature of man’s sex with woman in the starkest terms; ‘Isn’t it a bit like killing? Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards, leaving the body behind covered in blood – doesn’t it feel like murder, like getting away with murder?’
In Lucy’s case, sex is a form of terrorism and dominance, a marking of territory. Whilst Lurie suggests that the rapists’ crimes may have resulted from an ancestral history of female subordination, his explanation rings rather hollow. Instead, Coetzee implicitly suggests through Lucy’s voice that the conquest of her body was intended as a forfeit for the territory which she inhabits – territory formerly inhabited by native South Africans.
Her reluctance to alert the authorities reveals a public distrust of the judicial system, recalling criticism levelled at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up after the apartheid to allow victims of human rights violations to speak out against their aggressors.
The Failure of Communication
Where Lucy’s voice as a citizen is stifled by the threat of a fresh attack, Lurie’s role as a father is thrown into confusion. Unable to relate to his daughter’s ordeal, he succumbs to an uncomfortable silence that even parental love is unable to bridge.
Disgrace is underscored with numerous examples of frustrated attempts at expression. Even Lurie himself, as a former linguistic professor, is unwilling to accept the conventional claim that language is the relation of one human being’s experience to another. His own opinion is that speech originates from song, and that song originates from “the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.”
By the end of the novel, Lurie has renounced speech in favour of working on a chamber opera entitled Byron in Italy, whose unorthodox instrumentation reflects his own feelings of displacement. However, he is unable to finish it, lacking the ‘single note of immortal longing’ that would complete his heroine’s appeal for Byron's return. The problem is not so much down to artistic inadequacy as it is down to the changes which Lurie's failed affair and near-fatal attack have rendered in him. Unable to believe in such a human convention as everlasting romance, he entertains the thought of finishing his work with a dog’s song; an ultimate expression of bestial despair at the hands of man’s cruelty.
Despite the sombre nature of the themes and philosophical questions explored in Disgrace, Coetzee concludes his novel with a catharsis. Whether or not Lurie’s release is convincing, however, is doubtful, as Coetzee is only too aware of the irony that polishing off his work with a conventional ending would invoke. Readers should not, however, be put off by the prospect of a less-than-complacent read; the prose is simple and fluid enough to carry the reader from the first page to the last, whilst posing in an eloquent manner some of life’s most-sought questions about the nature of love, life and fate.
Text Source: Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee. London: Vintage, 2009. ISBN: 9780099535140
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