DISGRACE
By J.M. Coetzee
Viking, 220 pages, $23.95
The disgrace referred to in the title of South African writer J.M. Coetzee’s eighth novel is, at first glance, that of David Lurie, a 52-year-old academic dismissed from his post for having an affair with a student. But as Lurie retreats from Cape Town to lick his wounds in a rural community where his daughter, Lucy, has a farm, it becomes increasingly clear that disgrace is something that engulfs all the characters in this extraordinary book.
Lurie’s own decline, for instance, stretches back in time before the affair. When we first meet him he is already engaged in a series of clinical assignations with a mixed-race call girl, and we know that his previous position as a professor of modern languages has already been eroded to that of adjunct professor of communications. We sense that his disgrace began much earlier than the public humiliation of the denounced affair. This existing sense of slippage perhaps explains the increasingly self-destructive desperation of the affair and fuels Lurie’s reluctance to accept the job-saving if not face-saving apology his colleagues try to draw from him. For while Lurie will admit his error, he won’t ultimately ask for forgiveness. It’s a decision that seems at once arrogant but comes, as the book moves on, to seem increasingly humble. Lurie won’t ask for forgiveness because, it seems, some part of him doesn’t believe he deserves it. He seems instead to crave his disgrace, to embrace it in some sense, as if he wished to be punished.
It is a wish violently granted as the book moves on. Lucy’s farm in the Eastern Cape is attacked by three black men shortly after his arrival, and the professor who preyed on another man’s daughter is powerless to protect his own daughter from sexual assault. A lesser novelist might have aimed for tragedy here, or overplayed the harsh ironies (Lurie has slept with his student in his daughter’s old bed), but Coetzee recognizes tragedy as a kind of sentimentality and as such refuses to bestow it upon Lurie. Lucy is a character in her own right, not merely a means of punishing her father, and it is her reaction to the attack, not the attack itself, that will provide his lesson. Her reluctance to report her rape to the police, her at-once fatalistic and pragmatic acceptance of its consequences, suggests that she, too, is strangely willing to play the scapegoat and points toward the most deep-seated disgrace with which the novel is concerned. It comes out in a powerful exchange with her father:
” `You want to know why I have not laid a particular charge with the police. I will tell you, as long as you agree not to raise the subject again. The reason is that, as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, at this time, it is not. It is my business, mine alone.”
” `This place being what?”
” `This place being South Africa.’ “
Lucy apparently is as resigned to her fate as her father had been to his earlier, but as the stakes escalate her sense of guilt and justice shed light on his. He finds himself, in a quietly ferocious scene, sitting down to dinner with the family of the student he has slept with, and ultimately approaches a deeply equivocal redemption in volunteering at an animal clinic where his duty is to aid in putting injured animals out of their misery.
There’s an exquisite deftness to the way the plot circles itself and slowly draws together like a tightening noose. The coolness of the prose in this regard, its poise and austerity, is essential. It captures something of Lurie’s cold-fish quality–the book offers an absorbing psychological portrayal of an intellect’s fumbling grasp on desire–yet the coolness is ultimately not distancing. On the contrary, the lucid genius of the prose is unflinching in its examination of difficult moral truths.
What’s extraordinary ultimately about this short, rigorous novel is that within such a tawdry subject as a sexual-harrassment case, it finds a way of evoking the processes of another trial, another courtroom: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There an admission of guilt brings amnesty, but what, Coetzee seems to be asking, if the guilty don’t feel themselves deserving of amnesty?
Much justifiable attention has been paid in recent years to the growth of post-colonial literature, but “Disgrace” suggests a different, if related, strand of work, what might be called a post-imperialist literature, the literature not of the colonized but of the colonizer, in particular the literature of the colonizer in retreat. In such a literature of guilt and regret, “Disgrace” is an undeniable classic. If it shies away from reconciliation, at least in this time and place, it does offer truth and the possibility that truth may be its own reconciliation.
