J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Disgrace’: A Novel of Non-Empathy and the Unintelligibility of the Other
‘You don’t know what happened.’[1] Nothing can bring David Lurie, the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s second post-apartheid novel Disgrace, to truly understand his daughter Lucy’s traumatic experience of being gang-raped by ‘two men and a boy, all black’[2]. In this essay, I will first explain how the novel focalises the ‘‘black peril’ narrative’[3] that cultivated ‘white anxieties’[4] of the time, for example through its depiction of the ‘rape endemic’[5] and post-apartheid institutions. I will suggest this allegorical interpretation of the text, as ‘instrumentalis[t]’ and ‘politically efficac[ious]’[6] acts as a medium for Coetzee’s broader philosophical thesis. This being, a representation of empathy with the ‘other’, and the realisation this endeavour is the individual’s moral duty. This essay will argue this point through a narrowed focus on gender dichotomy as otherness, as evinced in the novel.
Disgrace is set before the turn of the century in Cape Town, South Africa. Having lifted the laws of apartheid, in 1994,[7] that systematically oppressed the black population by the Dutch-Afrikaans white colonists, a new representative democratic constituent was formed. The novel takes the new political institutions of post-apartheid, such as the African National Congress[8], and portrays them through Professor David Lurie’s trial at the hands of the university for his ‘victimization [and] harassment’[9] of a student, Melanie Isaacs. The committee of judgement, although having no power to ‘impose’, only ‘recommend [,] the severest penalty’,[10] is a depiction of the apparent ‘puritanical times’[11] the white South African lives amidst newfound political shifts. Lurie even goes so far as to connect his plight with that of ‘Mao’s China’ where one must ‘recant, self-critici[se] and public[ly] apolog[ise]’ in order to absolve oneself of wrongdoing[12]. This is further mirrored in the university’s shift from the ‘old-fashioned’[13] to ‘the great rationalization’[14]. The tensions between Lurie — whose ‘rule’ of life is ‘follow your temperament’[15], who invokes the power of ‘Eros’ and claims he was a ‘servant’ to desire in order to diffuse his guilt involving the sexual misconduct with Isaacs[16] — and South Africa, in general, can be sought in the Romantic ideals he clings to as juxtaposed to the liberalisation around him.
As Fetson Kalua argues, Lurie ‘inhabits the exilic consciousness mode’[17], a Saidian phenomenon whereby the protagonist of the colonial text is both geographically and metaphysically shifted or uprooted. Except, as the ‘Byron[ic]’ voice guides him to be ‘less hemmed in by convention [and] more passionate’[18], Lurie is entirely removed from the world and in doing so cannot meaningfully fathom the inner existence of women. This can be found in the manner in which Lurie states, having invaded a prostitute’s domestic sphere, ‘though [she] still kept her appointments, he feels a growing coolness as she transforms herself into just another woman and him into just another client’[19]. This solipsistic belief, that Lurie’s relationship with her is anything more than transactional, is affirmed when he attempts to contact her after her disappearance and refers to himself as ‘a predator […] intrud[ing] into the vixen’s nest’[20]. Lurie is removed from reality, and thus only perceives her world through the machinations of his own understanding; she exists only in relation to him.
The two central women of the text, Melanie and Lucy, are also problematized by Lurie’s empathic incapacitation. The delusion of his attempts to comprehend their position is concretely evinced in their mutual plight as victims of sexual harassment. In both instances, although he is the perpetrator in the case of Melanie and only a bystander in the case of Lucy, he believes to understand ‘[their] secret; [and by extension] his disgrace’[21]. However, the gap between his conception of reality, as man, and theirs, as women, is one that can never be abridged. In the instance of Isaacs, Lurie is so distended by his own perceptions, and desires, that he is ignorant of the ‘abuse’[22] he commits. Even in comparing himself to ‘a shark among the helpless little fishies’[23], the sardonicism relays his belief that the claims of rape, brought to charge against him, are absurd. Furthermore, the objectification of Isaacs as merely ‘limbs crumpl[ing] like a marionette’s’, and the cataloguing of her clothes, ‘T-shirt, cycling shorts, slippers in the shape of comic-book gophers’, makes her possessed by him, makes her only exist in his world[24].
In juxtaposition, the event of Lucy’s rape parallels Isaac’s and yet, even when his daughter is the victim of such a heinous crime, Lurie cannot grasp the connection; and, in turn, the ‘pain he has caused […and] the long history of exploitation of which [his act] is part’[25]. As Bev Shaw, another local animal activist and confident of Lurie’s daughter, echoes the harrowing words of Lucy’s confession, ‘you don’t understand, you weren’t there.’[26] But, in this repetition of Lurie’s inability to physically stop the violation of his ‘little girl’[27], there is also the transcendental realisation of his inability to fully reconstruct the extent of her trauma. Through the superficial suggestions of seeing a doctor, telling the whole story to the police and finding legislative justice, Lurie misses the point entirely. While he realises that ‘[he did nothing [, he] did not save [her]’[28], he never realizes that because ‘[he is] a man, [he] ought to know’[29]. That, while he literally is oblivious to the similarity of his own sexual exploitation of Isaacs, he is also obtuse to the fact that his own masculinity burdens him with the inability to comprehend Lucy’s position. Instead, he is afforded only the capacity to empathise with the rapists themselves, with the men.
Finally, Bev Shaw. We find in Lurie’s relationship with her the closest recognition of his own inherent biases. As a bachelor, who ‘will [not] accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts’[30], he tells himself ‘[Bev Shaw], this plain little creature [does not] think him incapable of shocking her’[31]. This egotistical portrayal of Shaw’s opinion of him, and her motives for their affair are further revealed by Lurie’s rhetoric imaginings, ‘[is she] like a nun who lies down to be violated so that the quota of violation in the world will be reduced’[32]? The Romantic within him, has come through once again as he compares Shaw to ‘Emma Bovary’ as he pictures her congratulating herself for his sexual relation with her, ‘I have a lover! I have a lover!’[33] The revelatory moment comes through the mimetic moment between Lurie and Shaw when he asks himself, ‘do I have to become like [her]?’[34] This elucidation comes after a reflection upon ‘the old billy-goat’ with the ‘ravaged testicles’[35]. The reflexivity comes not from Lurie finding in Shaw some semblance of himself, but in the goat itself. It illuminates for him their shared nature, him and the castrated animal are somewhat put to death, they both ‘ha[ve] begun to hate [their] own nature’[36]. The wallowing he feels in the loneliness of his own ‘disgrace’[37], he finds in the dogs; ‘as if they too feel the disgrace’[38]. Ultimately, in the events that transpire between himself, Bev and the animals, Lurie finally begins to ask the question, ‘does he have it in him to be the woman?’[39]
The dissociation of self from other, and the inherent disconnect that stems from socially constructed binaries like race, gender and species, is the greater locus of meaning found in Disgrace. This essay has shown the political reading of the text to be the contextual medium through which the metaphysical disparity between individuals, and the widening of this disparity by these aforementioned socially constructed identifiers. As hitherto shown, the most profound realisation in the text is that while ‘[understanding others] gets harder all the time’[40], whether futile or not, the endeavour itself is the integral part of becoming ‘a good person’[41].
Endnotes
[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace, (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 130.
[2] Derek Attridge, “Age of Bronze, State of Grace,” in J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading Literature in the Event, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 169.
[3] Lucy Valerie Graham, “Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” in Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 29, no. 2, (2003), 433.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid, 434.
[6] Attridge, 164.
[7] Rosemary Jolly, “Going to the Dogs: Humanity in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and the South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” in J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual, ed. Jane Poyner (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006) 148.
[8] Ibid, 149.
[9] Coetzee, 37.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid, 64.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid, 3.
[15] Ibid, 2.
[16] Ibid, 50.
[17] Fetson Kalua, “‘Seeing the entire world as a foreign land’: the exilic intellectual in JM Coetzee’s Disgrace,” in Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, vol. 17, no.1 (2012), 55.
[18] Coetzee, 14.
[19] Ibid, 7.
[20] Ibid, 9.
[21] Ibid, 107.
[22] Ibid, 51.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid, 22.
[25] Ibid, 51.
[26] Ibid, 157.
[27] Ibid, 103.
[28] Ibid, 154.
[29] Ibid, 155.
[30] Ibid, 88.
[31] Ibid, 144.
[32] Ibid, 145.
[33] Ibid, 147.
[34] Ibid, 123.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Ibid, 88.
[37] Ibid, 83.
[38] Ibid, 149.
[39] Ibid, 157.
[40] Ibid, 214.
[41] Ibid, 211.
Reference List
Attridge, Derek. “Age of Bronze, State of Grace.” In J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading Literature in the Event. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 162–191.
Azoulay, Ariella. “An alien woman/ a permitted woman: On J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.” In Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in South Africa, vol. 7, no. 1. 2002. 33–41. URL: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=mzh&AN=2002360604&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Barney, Richard A. “On (not) giving up: animals, biopolitics, and the impersonal in J.M. Coetzee’ Disgrace.” In Textual Practice, vol. 30, no. 3. 2016. 509–530. URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2016.1158941
Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
Cornwell, Gareth. “Realism, Rape, and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.” In Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 43, no. 4. 2002. 307–322. URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/00111610209602187
Graham, Lucy Valerie. “Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.” In Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 29, no. 2. 2003. 433–444. URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070306207
Jolly, Rosemary. “Going to the Dogs: Humanity in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and the South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” In J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Edited by Jane Poyner. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. 148–171.
Kalua, Fetson. “‘Seeing the entire world as a foreign land’: the exilic intellectual in JM Coetzee’s Disgrace.” In Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in South Africa, vol. 17, no. 1. 2012. 49–60. URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/18125441.2012.706035
