Disgrace JM Coetzee
J.M Coetzee: Disgrace
Disgrace is a novel by J. M. Coetzee, published in 1999. It won the Booker Prize. The writer was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature four years after its publication.
Characters:
Summary of J.M.Coetzee's 'Disgrace :
David Lurie is a Communications professor at Cape Town Technical University. He has been twice divorced, has one child and currently spends ninety minutes of his Thursday afternoons with a prostitute named Soraya. After Lurie crosses the line by phoning Soraya at her home, he turns to one of his students to fulfill his desires. Lurie first notices Melanie in the university gardens and invites her to his home for wine and dinner. That very same night, Melanie is almost caught in Lurie's web of seduction until he quotes a Shakespeare line, and she quickly leaves. Lurie does not stop his pursuits there however. Over the weekend, he travels to campus and uses the University's records to find her address and phone number. Startled at his call, Melanie agrees to have lunch with him. They return to his house and have sex on the living room floor. Young Melanie is passive throughout the majority of the act but Lurie on the other hand attains sensory overload and falls asleep on top of her. The next class is awkward and later that night Lurie spies on her while she is rehearsing for a play. The very next afternoon Lurie arrives at Melanie's flat, pushes himself in and carries her to the bed. She does not resist and asks him to leave after he is finished because her cousin is coming. She misses the mid-term the next day and arrives at his house sobbing that night needing a place to stay. Soon after, Melanie's boyfriend pays the professor a visit and events begin to snowball. Melanie withdraws from all her classes and a sexual harassment case is filed against Professor Lurie.
The investigation unfolds like a criminal trial with the judges being his colleagues on the committee. With Melanie's testimony already given and with the press as well as activist groups are waiting outside, Lurie is given the opportunity to feign remorse and pledge to seek treatment. He is given no grace and is fired. His only comment to the press is that he was "enriched" by the experience.
A social outcast, Lurie visits his daughter,Lucy, on her farm in Salem. The first days are slow as Lurie adjusts to country life but Lurie soon finds plenty to occupy his time as he volunteers at an animal shelter and helps the farm-hand, Petrus. Although both her parents are professionals, Lucy has turned to the rural life and lives by selling the crops she has raised on the weekends and running a small kennel.
The peace of the country does not last for long. As Lucy and Lurie are taking some of the dogs for a walk, they encounter three Africans on the road who ask to use their phone. Lucy makes the mistake of putting the dogs up in the kennel and within moments the men have taken Lucy into the house and locked the door behind them. For moments, Lurie is unable to get inside and protect his daughter. When he finally does get into the kitchen he is knocked unconscious by a blow to the head. Lucy is taken into a back room and raped by the three men. Before they leave, the robbers shoot the dogs in the kennel, ransack the house, set Lurie on fire and steal his car. Lucy seeks help from one of her neighbours to call the police and gets her father to the hospital to treat his burns. For the night, they stay with the Shaws, who are friends of Lucy and run the animal shelter Lurie volunteers at. Upon return to the farm the next day, they are able to access the damage. The house is ransacked and all but one dog must be buried. Lucy reports to the police officer the stolen property and her father's assault but says nothing about the rаре
Lucy goes through a period of depression after the attack. Since she barely leaves her bed, her father picks up a lot of the work around the house and is busy from sun up to sun down. Each time Lurie tries to talk to his daughter about the incident she either evades his questions or gives him a sharp reply. Lurie is enraged because the culprits have not been caught and Lucy fears that they may come back. Lurie however does not believe the robbery was simply an unfortunate event. He finds it suspicious that Lucy's farm-hand, Petrus, was nowhere to be found until a couple of days after the robbery.
When Petrus returns, he is wearing a new suit and has bought building supplies for his house. Lurie believes Petrus intentionally left the house unprotected so that it could be robbed. When Petrus invites Lucy and Lurie to a party to celebrate his new acquisition of land, Lucy comes face to face with the one of her attackers, a mentally disturbed young man named Pollux. Pollux is related to Petrus' wife. Lurie immediately wants to call the police and have him arrested, but Lucy refuses and returns home.
Lurie becomes more and more involved at the shelter, even having a brief affair with Bev, the shelter owner. Lurie's main duty at the shelter becomes clear: when Bev Shawgives a lethal injection to a dog, Lurie disposes of its body in the incinerator. Lurie does not realize how these killings have affected him until one day he must pull over on the roadside and cry. Petrus meanwhile makes progress with his land, He has borrowed a tractor, plowed the land and remodeled his home. Petrus' wife is expecting a child and Pollux has come to live with them. After a false alarm that Lurie's car had been recovered by the police, Lurie confronts his daughter about the future. From his perspective, she has little other option than to move. It is unsafe for a woman to live alone on the farm unprotected and Petrus cannot be trusted. He offers to send her to Holland, where her biological mother lives with the money he receives from selling his house. Lucy is not receptive to this idea at all. She is determined to stay in Salem.
Lurie returns to Cape Town and on his way back he stops in George to visit Mr. Isaacs. Mr. Isaacs is not home and his daughter, Desiree Isaacs, answers the door. Finding the young girl very attractive, Lurie does not stay long and instead finds Mr. Isaacs at his job. Mr. Isaacs is the principal of a middle school. Lurie attempts to explain himself in the office. Even though Mr. Isaacs is confused at his words, he invites Lurie to dinner with his family. The evening is clearly uncomfortable but Mr. Isaacs finally gets what he is seeking: an apology. When Lurie returns to his house in Cape Town, he finds it has been robbed and vandalized. He returns to his office and finds his replacement at his desk. For a while, Lurie tries to get his opera on Byron off the ground but comes to an impasse. Life back in Cape Town is not the same, he finds he is an outcast. After being given an update on Melanie by his ex-wife Rosalind, Lurie decides to see Melanie performs in a play. During the play, Melanie's boyfriend sees Lurie in the audience and harasses him telling him to stick with his own kind.
Lurie stays in contact with Lucy by phone, but senses that she is not telling him everything. After an ambiguous conversation with Bey Shaw, Lurie decides to visit his daughter. Lucy is pregnant from the rape and has made a conscious decision to keep the child. Lurie is shocked because he believed she had taken all precautions after the incident. Once more, he offers her an escape but she will not run.
Lucy decides her own course of action. She will sign over her land to Petrus (marrying him in a contractual sense) in exchange for protection and the right to remain in her house. Resigned, Lurie rents a room in Grahmstown to help his daughter at the market once a week and to dedicate himself to the disposal of the dogs' bodies at the shelter.
Critical Overview:
Ironically, the plot of this particular novel exudes a cycle of prejudice, discrimination, and hate derived from the main character, David Lurie. David Lurie is a divorced college professor who finds himself loosing his job because he forces a student to have sex with him. Feeling no remorse for his actions, Lurie is invited to live with his daughter, who is put in a similar situation because she is soon raped and impregnated by strangers who trespass on her property.
After these series of events, the main character goes back to his hometown to dedicate himself to writing his chamber opera and develops a different perspective on how to live his life. It is evident that the author of "Disgrace, J.M Coetzee, has written a subliminal message to this literary piece. One could conclude that his thoughts on racial prejudice and feminism are portrayed in this novel. Coetzee uses a series of situations involving the main character, David Lurie, to develop a repetitious theme to this story.
J.M Coetzee purposely illustrates the character of David Lurie chauvinistic. Noticeably, his attitude towards the student he sexually as chuses is very unsympathetic. He may not feel remorse for his actions because he does not view his victim as being equal to himself. J.M Coetzee allows his readers the opportunity to recognize a cycle in progression as a result to the actions of the main character, David Lurie. The irony is his daughter soon succumbs to rape just as Lurie's victim had. This climax to the novel grants the protagonist, David Lurie, the opportunity to be antagonized by letting him relive similar occurrences going on in his own life in reverse. For once, the main character shows compassion towards his daughter because, she too, is now a victim of brutality. David Lurie tries to understand her feelings.
Disgrace begins in Cape Town, South Africa with our narrator telling us that by this point in his life, 52-year-old Professor David Lurie has "solved the problem of sex rather well". We learn that he gets his jollies out by visiting a prostitute named Soraya once a week, and that while he fulfills his desires with her, the sex is missing that "wow" factor. In fact, David doesn't feel much passion for anything in his life, from his love life, to his career, to his hobbies until Melanie steps in.
Things start to feel a little bit off with her almost immediately, though, and we start to get the vibe that their affair is pretty one-sided. It comes to an end when David finds out that Melanie has filed a complaint against David with the University. After an investigation,
David loses his job, his status and as the title implies, his dignity. Realizing that there is nothing for him in Cape Town, David opts for a change of scenery. He heads east across the country to the rural town of Salem in the Eastern Cape, where his daughter Lucy lives alone on a small holding (a small farm that usually supports just one family), growing vegetables to sell at the Saturday market and running a kennel for dogs. David begins a new life there, helping Lucy at the market, assisting Lucy's neighbour Petrus with odd jobs and taking care of the dogs and volunteering at the Animal Welfare Clinic with Bev Shaw. He also spends time poring over his newest academic project, an opera based on the love affair between the British poet Lord Byron and his mistress Teresa Guiccioli. Things seem to be going just fine for a while, despite David's apparent distaste for the life that Lucy has chosen for herself. Lucy realizes that David would have expected a daughter of his to choose a more prestigious life path rather than digging around in the dirt all day by choice and hanging out with unrefined, uneducated folks. Still, life in the country goes on without a hitch and David seems able to adjust to it.
Then one day everything changes. David and Lucy are out and about taking a couple of the dogs for a walk when they run into three strangers -two men and a boy on the road. Both David and Lucy feel a little sketched out by the encounter but shrug it off and keep walking. When they get home, they find that all of the dogs in the kennel are barking like crazy. The boy has apparently been taunting them from outside the pen while the two men (whom the narrator calls the tall man and the second man) just seem to be waiting for David and Lucy. The boy tells Lucy that they need to use the phone because the sister of one of the men is having an accident that is to say a baby.
Lucy tells David to stay outside while she takes the tall man indoors to use the phone. Big mistake. The second man runs in to the house behind them and locks David out In a total panic, David lets go of the bulldog's leash and commands the dog to go after the boy.
Then he kicks down the kitchen door, Apparently untrained in the Lucy tells David to stay outside while she takes the tall man going-after-bad-guys arts, David falls victim to the intruders almost immediately, he feels someone whack him over the head. He falls down, barely conscious and feels himself being dragged across the floor. When he comes to, he is locked in the bathroom and wondering what is going on with Lucy. The second man comes in to get the car keys from David and then locks him back in. Meanwhile, he looks out and sees the tall man with a rifle. The tall man starts shooting the dogs one by one, splattering brains and guts all over the place. The second man and the boy come back in the bathroom, douse David with alcohol and set him on fire (luckily just his hair catches ablaze and he extinguishes himself in the toilet). They leave, stealing David's car, David and Lucy are left to deal with everything that just happened. During this whole nightmare, Petrus is nowhere to be found. Over the coming days and weeks, Lucy falls apart both physically and emotionally and it is pretty clear that the men raped her. Still, she does not want to pursue the crime as a rape – she is only willing to report it as a robbery and assault. The relationship between David and Lucy grows increasingly strained and David turns to Bey for advice over and over again. Petrus comes back and throws a party at his place. David and Lucy attend and things seem to be going all right until Lucy tells David that the boy is at the party and they have to leave. David gets all worked up and goes to confront the boy. Petrus gets in the middle of their fight and it becomes pretty obvious that Petrus and the boy know each other pretty well.
David says he will go to the police. Petrus gets in the middle of their fight and it becomes pretty obviously that Petrus and the boy know each other pretty well. David says he will go to the police. Lucy gets upset because she does not want David to ruin everything for Petrus, who is just starting to make his way in the world. Instead of making things better, David just ends up making things worse between himself and Lucy.
David tries to spend time outside of the house to give Lucy some breathing room. He spends more and more time with Bev in the clinic, helping her to put unwanted animals to sleep and taking whatever advice he can get from her. Somehow, in the romantic light of the clinic's surgery room, Bey takes a shine to David and they end up having sex on the floor. Soon after, David gets a call that his car has been found and that arrests have been made in his case. He is pretty psyched until he finds out it was all a mistake. This experience brings a lot of repressed emotions to the surface, driving Lucy and David's relationship to a breaking point. He realizes he has to leave. On his way back to Cape Town, David goes to visit Melanie's dad to explain his side of the story. Melanie's dad invites him over for dinner with the whole family. It is awkward. David apologizes for what he put everyone through. David arrives back in Cape Town and finds that his home has been robbed. He tries to start over, but realizes that what he wants to do is to come crawling back to Lucy. A phone conversation with Bev gives him the excuse to do just that. She tells him that there have been "developments" and that he should talk to Lucy. David goes back to the Eastern Cape only to find out that Lucy is pregnant and it is likely that the boy is the father. Also, she has decided to keep the baby, which throws David for a loop. The next time boy (whose name, we find out, is Pollux), David gives him a good smack in the face. As the novel ends, David is back in the clinic with Bev, once again putting animals to sleep. He picks out his favorite dog from the clinic's shelter and gives it to Bev, saying that he is "giving him up."
Important themes portrayed in Disgrace:
Animal Treatment:
One of David Lurie's greatest transformations in the novel concerns his attitude towards animals. Initially, when he meets Bev Shaw, the owner of the animal shelter, he is repelled. She is not attractive and smells of the animals she works with all day. Reluctantly, he agrees to volunteer at the shelter as his daughter suggests. His experience assisting with the treatment and etherisation of animals changes his perspective. At one time convinced animals have no souls, Lurie is disturbed when two sheep he has become acquainted with are slaughtered for Petrus' party. By the end of the book, Lurie discovers that his purpose in life is not to write a famous opera on Byron or even to be an animal rights' advocate. He finds his purpose in the humble task of disposing of the dogs' bodies with dignity.
Fathers-Daughters relationship:
David Lurie and Lucy Lurie have a unique father-daughter relationship from the novel's beginning. Even though Lucy was raised in a home of two academics, she has chosen the life of a farmer. Her livelihood comes from the sale of flowers and vegetables and the housing of dogs on her farmland. As a white lesbian woman, she lives by herself in Salem, South Africa. Lurie on the other hand lives in Cape Town. His livelihood comes not from the work of his hands hut from the generation of ideas. He has written three books and currently hopes to compose a opera about byron. The two could not be more different, yet they both find themselves caught in devastation that forever changes their lives. Disgrace unites them. Lurie has been fired from his position as professor because of sexual misconduct with a student. Lucy has been raped by three Africans and must bear the shame and humiliation the crime carries with it in her community.
Race:
Disgrace is set in post-apartheid South Africa. Even though apartheid has legally ended, its legacy still haunts the country. Robbery and vandalism frequent the countryside. Rape is a common occurrence. The outrage from a history of oppression and violence cannot be suppressed. J.M. Coetzee brings racial tensions to the forefront of the novel when David Lurie arrives in Salem. His daughter, Lucy, is one of the few white farmers remaining in the region. In the back of her property lives an African named Petrus who helps around the farm tending to the garden and helping with the farm. He is in a subservient position. The racial dynamics become more strained when Petrus is implicated in indirectly facilitating a robbery on her land. He disappears when three men attack and comes back with building supplies to renovate his new house. The division becomes clear when Lurie confronts Petrus. The end of the novel however, does not allow for such a clear distinction when Lucy becomes pregnant with one of the robbers' children and thus becomes a part of Petrus' family, though unwillingly.
Rape
Lucy is raped by three men as they rob her house. The rape is a violent, hate-filled act. Although they are strangers, it is described as "personal." Lucy makes the critical decision not to report the rape because to her it is a private matter. She also realizes that in the context of modern South Africa, no true justice will be served. The rape forever changes her relationship with her father. There is now a clear division between men and women. Her father becomes one of them. Her father must stand on the outside as he watches his daughter go through the aftermath of fear and depression, unable to offer any comfort or solace.
Justice:
As an ideal, justice is the standard by which one measures guilt and innocence However in this novel, J.M. Coetzee explores the moral foundation on which justice depends. The university's investigation into'the sexual harassment charges filed against Lurie is modeled after the criminal justice system. Throughout the hearing, guilt and confession are inextricably linked. Justice becomes a public act that is driven by guilt and shame. Lucy too finds herself struggling within the justice system. She decides not to report her rape in order to protect her privacy. However even with the charges of theft and robbery reported, justice is never served. The criminals are never prosecuted.
Geriatric Séxuality
At fifty-two, David Lurie is a sexually active man. He has been married twice and currently sleeps with a prostitute to fulfill his needs. The problem comes when Lurie crosses both departmental and generational boundaries and sleeps with his student. As a professor, it is against the University's code of conduct to sleep with a student, When Lurie crosses this boundary, he places the student in a difficult situation. Although she complies, his position of power gives Lurie an unfair advantage. The young student drops out of school and eventually files charges. Lurie is fired and publicly censured for his action when the student's boyfriend commands him to "stick to your own kind.
Apartheid
Apartheid literally means "apartness" in Afrikans and Dutch, The apartheid system segregated groups along racial lines. The groups were mainly White, Black, Indian and Coloured. These classifications determined one's geography, job, economic status and access to resources such as education and healthcare. Although apartheid was not legally put in place until the takeover by the white Afrikaaner-run National Party in 1948, it has its roots in South Africa's colonial past under British rule. Under colonial rule the object was political separation, termed "grand apartheid." Segregation, termed "petty apartheid," did not come into play until National Party came into rule.
During apartheid not only mixed-race marriages but also inter racial sex was prohibited. Every individual was classified by race. If the race of an individual was ambiguous, a committee was formed to settle the matter. Just as in America, the society claimed to uphold a standard of "separate but equal" treatment that led to wild disparity in practice. Black hospitals were inadequately funded and staffed, housing in black areas rarely had plumbing and electricity.
Resistance to Apartheid came in the form of the African National Congress (ANC) and other political entities. They staged protests, marches and strikes. As the atrocities of apartheid gained Western attention in the 80's, the apartheid state was swiftly weakened. In the final years of apartheid, South Africa was in a state of emergency.
The most violent years were from 1985-1988 during which the government became a police state crushing any opposition or threat to its authority, In 1994, Nelson Mandela won the first post-apartheid election by a landslide and became the first president of South Africa.
Critical Analysis:
Even though Disgrace is written in third person, David Lurie's language, thoughts and perceptions dominate the text. Every character the reader experiences is filtered through Lurie. Yet access to Lurie's interior does not produce intimacy so much as it reveals his isolation.
This is most apparent in his relationships with women. Within the first few chapters of the novel, the reader is introduced in detail to two of Lurie's lovers: Soraya and Melanie. These women vary in age, ethnicity and education. The only thing they have in common really, is Lurie and his inability to connect with them.
Lurie's relationship with Soraya, the prostitute, is founded on money. However, as Lurie describes his relationship, we realize that the reason his relationships are so uncomplicated is that Lurie does not allow them to be. He keeps them strictly superficial. Soraya, for instance, is a complicated Muslim woman. Lurie, however, knows nothing at all about her. He does not know where she lives, whether or not she has children, how old she is or even what her real name is.
When Soraya claims to hate nude beaches and beggars, Lurie does not probe the inherent contradiction between her opinion and her occupation. Moreover, Lurie fails to act on his recognition of the injustice of Soraya's employment at Discreet Escorts. Lurie considers paying Soraya directly, cutting out the Escort service, but he dislikes the possibility of having to see her in the morning.
Lurie's relationship with Soraya epitomizes his brazen disregard for the law, societal rules or ethics. It is utterly selfish. Therefore, it is not completely surprising when Lurie crosses another boundary and has another wholly selfish sexual relationship with a student. Coetzee suggests that his pursuit of Melanie is predatory in nature. He first sees Melanie in the University gardens, a metaphoric and fertility. The garden also resonates with the Bible as the place where Eve was seduced by the serpent. At every turn, Lurie has reason to believe that his advances are inappropriate. He and Melanie do not even share interests. As they watch the Norman McLaren movie, Lurie wants Melanie to be "captivated," yet Melanie watches passively. She is passive, too, during sex. Lurie ignores every indication that Melanie is repulsed by him, instead choosing to interpret her behaviors though his own desires.
Though the committee repeatedly denies that they are running a trial, both Coetzee and Lurie reject this claim. Lurie, indeed, refuses as a matter of principle to play along with their attempts to couch the hearing in language other than that of trial and judgment. No matter how carefully or skillfully the committee plays the game of semantics, Lurie is able to cut through the pretense and discern what they are truly seeking: a confession. Lurie understands that the committee wishes to make him confess to the inappropriate nature of his desires and refuses to do so. He refuses to conflate the committee's judgment of guilt with a public shaming. Lurie's insight into the nature of his trial, however, does not absolve him from disgrace. The committee offers him a chance to control his disgrace by admitting it. When he refuses, he is disgraced anyway. More importantly, Lurie's insight into the psychology of shame does not mean that he is innocent of the crime he is accused of. He clearly acted with reckless and cruel selfishness in his manipulation of Melanie. He is, plainly, a rapist. So though ne has subtle insight into the language games of the committee, refusing to shame himself, he is not above using similar language games to justify his lust for and abuse of Melanie. Lurie sees that the committee requires shame and refuses to compromise himself.
On a second level, Lurie's trial alludes to events in South African history. In 1995, A Truth and Reconciliation Committee was formed by the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act. South Africa was a country devastated by the atrocities of apartheid. During the hearings, thousands of witnesses came forth and gave their testimonies. The accused were given amnesty as long as they told the entire truth. Approximately a third of these trials were heard in public. Similarly, the trial of David Lurie takes on a greater cultural significance. The manner in which he haughtily uses his status and gender to get what he wants-Melanie-is analogous to white South Africans' attitude during apartheid. Lurie, like an embodiment of the white supremacist element in South Africa refuses to apologize for his abuse of power. This does not stop him, just as it did not stop the Truth and Reconciliation Committee from rooting out vestiges of apartheid, from being removed from power.
Lurie's entrance into the country is also his introduction to a special relationship with animals. From his first day, Lurie grows attached to an abandoned bulldog named Katy. The dog is depressed and unresponsive to Lurie. Yet despite this, he feels enough of a connection to the dog to fall asleep in her cage. Lurie immediately becomes somewhat sympathetic in terms of his relationship to animals.
He loves Katy and feels disgust toward humans who would abandon such a creature. When Lurie first sees Bev Shaw, he says, he has nothing against animal lovers with whom Lucy has been mixed up as long as he can remember. The world would no doubt be a worse place without them. So when Bev Shaw opens her ront door he puts on a good face, though in fact he is repelled by the odours of cat urine and dog mange and Jeyes Fluid that greets them.
As Lurie's interacts more with Bev, he comes to understand the special role that she plays, Overcoming his superficial repulsion.
He sees her, indeed, as a powerful force in the community-an almost magical bringer of hope and death.
The chapter begins with a peaceful morning observing geese Within pages, father and daughter are forever changed by horrible violence. This violence seems to take on an inevitable power of its own. Lurie has his heroic moment when he kicks in the kitchen door in order to save his daughter, but his heroism is ridiculously short- lived as he is knocked down. He is powerless to help himself or his daughter. Underscoring his humiliation, the robbers set him on fire.
The dogs, too, prove unable to save their keepers. The incident affects Lucy and Lurie's relationship as well as their bodies. The nature of the respective crimes they have suffered separates them.
Their crimes are separate and deeply personal. Each must deal with the aftermath individually.
Immediately following the crime, Lucy feels nothing so much as fear. She does not want to sleep in her room, nor the freezer room.
The crime has touched each part of the house. Lucy's room is where the гape occurred and the freezer is filled with meat for dogs that no longer exist. Yet in the midst of her fear, Lucy's instinct is not to run away.
Lucy's decision not to report the rape is critical. Lucy refuses to report the crime and divulge its details under the premise of her right to privacy, just as Lurie attempted to protect his privacy in his trial. Lucy is cognizant of the cultural context of the crime. She knows the nature of the criminal justice system in South Africa and does not hold unrealistic expectations for the prosecution of the crime. She also understands that the scales of justice can never truly be balanced.
Like the pursuit of adequate confession in Lurie's trial, no verbal testimony or justification will ever be adequate reparation for the crime committed. Lucy and Lurie, thus, both share a cynical knowingness of the justice system. The nature of their exposure to this system, however, could not be more different: Lurie is an exploiter of innocence, a rapist; Lucy is a rape victim.
Lurie is not able to pin down Petrus' involvement in the incident. Lurie's search for the truth can be described as both anthropological research and an inquisition. He rejects the simple prospect that Petrus set up the crime as payback for his servile treatment, instead deciding that the truth is more complicated. Lurie realizes that the crime is connected to culture-that it is silly to judge such a historically complex situation on the basis of simple guilt and innocence. When he envisions the process of seeking the truth, he sees himself as an anthropologist with clear objectives and methodology conducted a well-planned survey.
On the whole, this section pivots on the delicate balance between personal outrage and historical perspective. Coetzee leaves us without a clear sense of which approach is best, he merely offers the dilemma in all its wrenching complexity. Lucy represents one approach-complete capitulation to cultural determinations of justice. Lurie represents another-insistence upon personal vindication. Each character recognizes the other's position, which only increases the poignancy of their growing separation.
Since the robbery, Lurie has been unable to get his daughter to talk to him about the rape. He has tried, for the first time in his otherwise selfish existence, to reach out, to help, but these attempts have been met coldly. Though Lurie has been ostracized before- by Soraya, after the Melanie scandal-this ostracism truly hurts him and he seems to be unable to repair it in any way. It is tied up with enormous issues- race, gender, status that Lurie cannot simply wish away.
Though Lurie is able to contextualize the act in terms of the historical mistreatment of black South Africans, his daughter continues to exhibit distance toward him. The fact that he is a man stands between them; she realizes, knowing his history with Soraya and Melanie, that Lurie too is a predatory sexual creature, a rapist. Her experience has completely eradicated any sympathy she once felt for Lurie's exile. He is part of another great socio-historical injustice: not apartheid, but misogyny.
Lurie responds to the overwhelming pressure of these complex questions by developing sympathy for animals. It is almost as though he displaces the grief and shame he won't allow himself to express about the rapes of Melanie and his daughter onto a simple affection for the dogs he must kill and bury.
The exchange is captured also in Petrus and Lurie's cooperation in laying the pipes. Petrus treats Lurie like a child who simply hands the tools to the knowledgeable tool-user. Indeed, Lurie has handed Petrus his "tools" in more ways than one. The tools that Lurie once used to manipulate society-his erudition, his gender, his status-have become worthless and debased. Petrus' tools, on the other hand-his skillful labour, his status as a black African-have grown useful. They help him to establish his own land. Lurie has no place of his own. Whereas Petrus gains a home. Lurie finds his ransacked and robbed.
Needless to say, this exchange of power corresponds to the historical exchange of power from white to black South Africans. Although Lurie achieves no truly sustainable relationship with these women, they provide the reader with moments of narrative relief. Their words provide a revealing picture of David Lurie,unclouded by his delusions.
Animals in Disgrace
Disgrace deal with anthropogenesis as is In Disgrace, the animals – snakes and dogs in particular – function as both symbols and tools. They have no identity or real purpose outside of those functions.
Snake:
The snakes are seen throughout the text (often in conjunction with a garden) and are meant to make the reader think of Satan as the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, representing temptation and “falls from grace.”
Desire makes Lurie think of animal life. He links the human body to metaphorical animals. Lurie thinks of the intercourse between himself and Soraya in terms of "the copulation of snakes", a copulation that is "lengthy, absorbed, but rather abstract, rather dry, even at its hottest". If he were to choose a totem, he thinks, it would be the snake. He exists “in an anxious flurry of promiscuity” trying to come to terms with the demands of his body. Ageing is a state of disgrace in that Lurie thinks of castrating himself. At least he thinks of castration, of the sort often done to animals: “they do it to animals every day, and animals survive well enough, if one ignores a certain residue of sadness”. Ageing, castration, love/mating, and death are common to the lives of humans and animals.
What precedes Lurie‟s encounter with animals—with the body of the other—are raw encounters with his own sexed body and the bodies of women he has sex with. A follower of Eros, Lurie has a heart that “lurches with desire”.
His love to his student is described in terms of animal imagery and as if she were “a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck”. He deems himself to the university committee be “a servant of Eros” . He pleads guilty but he refuses to issue a statement of public apology. He goes to the Eastern Cape to his daughter‟s smallholding. It is in this part of the story that the overlap between human and animal bodies begins. Lucy takes cats and dogs in her farm, which allows for the human/animal encounters I discuss in the next section.
The serpent was a symbol of evil power and chaos from the underworld as well as a symbol of fertility, life and healing. Hebrew for "snake", is also associated with divination, including the verb form meaning "to practice divination or fortune-telling". In the Hebrew Bible, occurs in the Torah to identify the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
the Book of Revelation as the "ancient serpent" or "old serpent"(YLT) used to describe "the dragon" Satan the Adversary,(YLT) who is the devil. This serpent is depicted as a red seven-headed dragon having ten horns, each housed with a diadem. The serpent battles Michael the Archangel in a War in Heaven which results in this devil being cast out to the earth. While on earth, he pursues the Woman of the Apocalypse. Unable to obtain her, he wages war with the rest of her seed (Revelation 12:1-18). He who has the key to the abyss and a great chain over his hand, binds the serpent for a thousand years. The serpent is then cast into the abyss and sealed within until he is released (Revelation 20:1-3).
In Christian tradition, the "ancient serpent" is commonly identified with the Genesis serpent and as Satan. This identification redefined the Hebrew Bible's concept of Satan ("the Adversary", a member of the Heavenly Court acting on behalf of God to test Job's faith), so that Satan/Serpent became a part of a divine plan stretching from Creation to Christ and the Second Coming.
In traditional Christianity, a connection between the Serpent and Satan is created, and Genesis 3:14-15 where God curses the serpent, is seen in that light: "And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life / And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel" (KJV).
Dog:
Lurie tells Lucy a story about a male dog that the neighbours kept when Lucy was young and living in Kenilworth.
The dog would get excited if a bitch got close. Its owners would beat it to the extent that it “had begun to hate its own nature”. According to Lurie, “No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instinct” He tells this story to his daughter because he felt so sometimes. He admits, however, that “Sometimes I have felt just the opposite. That desire is a burden we could well do without”. Lurie allegorizes animals to expose his corporeal predicament in a desiring body. The animal here becomes an objective correlative for the human, a trope for human desires. In other words, desire is the animal within. And following the same logic, he who succumbs to Eros
The dogs can also been seen as symbols. For the non-white Africans, the dogs were symbols of white oppression of violence. That is part of the reason why Lucy’s attackers killed almost all of her dogs in the kennel. Now we have the dogs in relation to Lurie. They are used to change Lurie; they foster empathy. Outside of that, they have little to no purpose or identity. They function more as plot elements than characters.
For critics who read the play through an allegorical lens, Lurie's negative outlook for the future does not speak well of his outlook on South Africa, South Africa where the crimes of history haunt the present. A nation conceived in hatred gives rise to more hatred. It's violence-under which white farmers suffer post-apartheid-is the natural result of prior unjust policies toward blacks. Rape begets rape. Hate Lurie's begets hate.
Reception and interpretation
According to Adam Mars-Jones, writing in The Guardian, "Any novel set in post-apartheid South Africa is fated to be read as a political portrait, but the fascination of Disgrace is the way it both encourages and contests such a reading by holding extreme alternatives in tension. Salvation, ruin." In the new South Africa, violence is unleashed in new ways, and Lurie and his daughter become victims, yet the main character is no hero; on the contrary, he commits violence in his own way as is clearly seen in Lurie's disregard for the feelings of his student as he manipulates her into having sexual relations with him. This characterization of violence by both the 'white' and the 'black' man parallels feelings in post-apartheid South Africa where evil does not belong to the 'other' alone. By resisting the relegation of each group into positive and negative poles Coetzee portrays the whole range of human capabilities and emotions.
The novel takes its inspiration from South Africa's contemporary social and political conflict, and offers a bleak look at a country in transition. This theme of transition is represented in various forms throughout the novel, in David's loss of authority, loss of sexuality and in the change in power dynamics of groups that were once solely dominant or subordinate.
Sarah Ruden suggests that:
As in all of his mature novels, Coetzee here deals with the theme of exploitation. His favorite approach has been to explore the innocuous-seeming use of another person to fill one's gentler emotional needs.
This is a story of both regional and universal significance. The central character is a confusing person, at once an intellectual snob who is contemptuous of others and also a person who commits outrageous mistakes. His story is also local; he is a white South African male in a world where such men no longer hold the power they once did. He is forced to rethink his entire world at an age when he believes he is too old to change and, in fact, should have a right not to. This theme, about the challenges of aging both on an individual and societal level, leads to a line, "No country, this, for old men," an ironic reference to the opening line of the W. B. Yeats poem, "Sailing to Byzantium". Furthermore, Lurie calls his preference for younger women a "right of desire", a quote taken up by South African writer André Brink for his novel "The Rights of Desire".
By the end of the novel, though, Lurie seems to mature beyond his exploitative view of women. In recognizing the right of Lucy to choose her course in life, he finally puts "their strained relationship on a more equal footing" — the first time in his relationships with women. His pursuit of a sexual relationship with Bev Shaw also marks something of a path toward personal salvation, "by annihilating his sexual vanity and his sense of superiority."
This is Coetzee's second book (after Life and Times of Michael K) where man is broken down almost to nothing before he finds some tiny measure of redemption in his forced acceptance of the realities of life and death. Coetzee has always situated his characters in extreme situations that compel them to explore what it means to be human. Though the novel is sparse in style, it covers a number of topics: personal shame, the subjugation of women, a changing country, and romantic poetry and its allegory and symbolism.
Another important theme in the novel is the difficulty or impossibility of communication and the limits of language. Although Lurie teaches communications at Cape Town Technical University and is a scholar of poetry, language often fails him.
Coetzee writes: Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: 'Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings, and intentions to each other.' His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overly large and rather empty human soul.
A 2006 poll of "literary luminaries" by The Observer newspaper named the work as the "greatest novel of the last 25 years" of British, Irish or Commonwealth origin in years between 1980 and 2005.
A film adaptation of Disgrace starring John Malkovich had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008, where it won the International Critics' Award.
On November 5, 2019, the BBC News listed Disgrace on its list of the 100 most influential novels.
ABOUT J. M. COETZEE
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and the Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history.
PRAISE
“—Disgrace is not a hard or obscure book—it is, among other things, compulsively readable—but what it may well be is an authentically spiritual document, a lament for the soul of a disgraced century.”
—The New Yorker
“—A subtly brilliant commentary on the nature and balance of power in his homeland…Disgrace is a mini-opera without music by a writer at the top of his form.”
—Time
“—Mr. Coetzee, in prose lean yet simmering with feeling, has indeebehavioured a lasting work: a novel as haunting and powerful as Albert Camus’s The Stranger.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“A tough, sad, stunning novel.”
—Baltimore Sun
IMPORTANT QUESTIONS
The novel begins by telling us that “For a man his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.” What can you infer about David Lurie’s character from this sentence? In what ways is it significant, particularly in relation to the events that follow, that he views sex as a “problem” and that his “solution” depends upon a prostitute?
Lurie describes sexual intercourse with the prostitute Soraya as being like the copulation of snakes, “lengthy, absorbed, but rather abstract, rather dry, even at its hottest.” When he decides to seduce his student, Melanie, they are passing through the college gardens. After their affair has been discovered Melanie’s father says that he never thought he was sending his daughter into “a nest of vipers.” Lurie has also written a book about Faust and Mephistopheles and explicates for his class a poem by Byron about the fallen angel, Lucifer, whom Lurie describes as being “condemned to solitude.” What do you think Coetzee is trying to suggest through this confluence of details? How clearly does Lurie himself understand his behavior? How does his reading of the Byron poem prefigure his own fate?
Quotations:
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A critical and literary analysis
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