Yesterday, I published my initial take on J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, so today’s Daily Note is a review put together this morning. Edited and improved from the rough draft for clarity.

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Coetzee pulls very few punches here. He isn’t overtly happy or unhappy with the new South Africa of the 90s. It is the tough analysis of the pain and misery that by necessity comes with it that interests him. How can a nation built on violence avoid its recurrence when the entire structure is turned upside down?

You can make the leap (I will do so now) that the plot of Disgrace is a retelling of South Africa’s modern history (up to Disgrace’s 1999 publication) condensed into 220 pages. David Lurie, a white professor of minor authority, feels justified in acting on desire at the cost of a student less powerful than himself. As it would have been in other dimensions during apartheid, there are few moral compunctions that force David to catch himself out when exercising power for his gain. He is, in his words, “a servant of Eros.” (p. 52) To act on his sexual impulse at the cost of another is no great crime; it belongs to a sort of (super)natural order. Justification.

His thoughts and actions are not totally beyond his comprehension, but the abstract structure he is used to inhabiting grants him impetus to act. Similarly, the formal existence of apartheid and colonial rule in South Africa relied upon a heady cocktail of ideas, forces, interests, and ideologies combined to build a self-justifying fortress in which white South Africans exercised power over the black majority.

But times do move forward. Apartheid did collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and pressures. Lurie is reported on; he believes the student is pressured by her family and friends to do so — apartheid fell, in part, due to international coercion, but ultimately because the situation was morally and functionally untenable. He is sent before a university committee which has no legal power of its own (cue the Truth & Reconciliation Commission), but which hopes to see repentance on the part of Lurie. Unsurprisingly, he does not give in. In his words:

‘These are puritanical times. Private life is public business. Prurience is respectable, prurience and sentiment. They wanted a spectacle: breast-beating, remorse, tears if possible. A TV show, in fact. I wouldn’t oblige.’ (p. 66)

He accepts the charges of his accuser without having even read them, a sign of frivolity to the committee. Try as his colleagues might to throw him a bone, he refuses to cooperate and is eventually fired. Lurie is not delusional enough to believe he was completely wronged — he knows he had a part in his downfall. That he’s been melodramatic. Yet he feels (or again, justifies) his age as the barrier to his going along. If these are the new rules he’d rather absent himself entirely. Change is beyond a man of 52.

But it is not as simple as opting out. Save for the finality of death, all who draw breath must reckon and be reckoned with. When Lurie retreats to the Eastern Cape to avoid the storm of his ruined life in Cape Town all he finds is another face of a changing nation. In this place the concern is not the university, but arable land.

His daughter, Lucy — independent, industrious, white, a lesbian — has come to the Cape to eke out a living right as the earth’s foundation has reversed. Gone or dying (or soon to be shot) are the confident white landholders backed by the state’s violent power. Enter the black farmers who were once a sort of slave caste on these lands. Inevitably, friction. And the story of South Africa moves from the shadows of the university novel to something concrete.

Lucy’s position is tenuous from the moment Lurie arrives: she wants to maintain her small bit of freedom, but her land is coveted. When she is raped by three men (and Lurie set alight covered in flammable spirits), the crime takes on a wider contour when it one of the rapists turns out to be the kin of Lucy’s (black) neighbor, Petrus. To Lurie, staying would be intolerable. The once all-powerful police have dissipated and Petrus’s offer to protect Lucy if she agrees to marry him is outrageous. And still, Lucy accepts. Willing, as she says:

’To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity… like a dog.” (p. 205)

It isn’t clear if her action is rooted in martyrdom. In her words, she aims to retain a control over some aspect of her life and to make something good of it (her child from the rape). The safety Lurie tried to take from his student his been thoroughly shorn from his daughter instead. Karmically, it is Lucy who pays for a similar sin as her father’s.

The two cycles of destruction and rape are portrayed as immoral regardless of who perpetrates it. Our protagonist clothes his transgressions in the guise of petite bourgeois university goings-on. Transgressions by others are nakedly meant for threat, retribution, domination. Meaning and intent matter on some level, but once distilled little separates the act of one versus that of another besides degree.

But it is Lucy, now a member of a potentially vulnerable minority that once lorded over the land, who takes her violation and tries to accommodate it. Her rape is not reported to the authorities. She has no interest in gaining vengeance or dishing out violence to the rapist living next door. Lurie’s insistence on a “just” outcome pushes their relationship to the breaking point. There is a fundamental misunderstanding here.

What is Lucy sacrificing herself for? Lurie has the means to give her a fresh start. There isn’t a requirement to undergo a kind of subjugation by the shifting tides of South Africa — as for many white South Africans post-1994, moving abroad is an option. Perhaps Lucy is ahead of the curve, though. What looks like surrender to one person is seen as a bargain that must be made to another. The vast majority is no longer under the heel of apartheid. For the new South Africa to find its footing without massacre, recrimination, another sea of blood, there will need to be accommodation; humiliation, even. Is that an intolerable price to pay if it means creating the space for the possibility of a more just future not just for the majority, but for South Africans of all types?

After all, while Lurie is adamant about his inability to change, there exist the once-oppressed who will also struggle to change in the light of a totally new day. The entire nation was designed to twist, break, and ruin those who inhabited it. To let bygones be bygones is to task ordinary individuals with marshaling extraordinary wells of forgiveness. South Africa was and remains in some ways an extreme in how vast its contradictions can be, but societies of all kinds must grapple with competing living memories. Logic of numbers means the majority will almost always prevail in their wishes. What is to be done with the rump minorities, then, assuming rights are to be granted to them? Vilify them? Wait for time to do its work? Coerce them under the will of the majority? Forgive them their trespasses in the hope that they forgive you yours?

Interestingly, Coetzee seems to avoid taking a strong stance on all of this. Inasmuch as he favors a “side” it is a sort of grudging and cynical view of the path South Africa may need to walk to reach a semblance of equilibrium. By the end of Disgrace Lurie has stopped trying; his days are spent in the Eastern Cape helping euthanize and dispose of dying animals. In a wrenching final scene, he does not try to stave off the death of a dog whose love for Lurie is painful to read. Tears rise suddenly at the final pages.

‘Yes, I am giving him up.’ (p. 220)  

Rather than strive for a new place in a new nation, Lurie has consented to his own annihilation through ambivalence. Are we to see in this a sad ending, or the path of least possible resistance if a society at odds with itself is to avoid conflict which would tear it apart? And does Lurie’s lowering of himself from the university to the plane of domestic animals truly represent a fall into disgrace? A piercingly down note on which to end a book full of them.

Masterfully done.