J. M. Coetzee’s first post-apartheid novel, Disgrace, combines the story of David Lurie – a fifty-two-year-old university professor who writes ‘books about dead people’142 – with a larger narrative that addresses the problems of representing both the racial other and sexual violence on women in post-apartheid South Africa. Enacting two parallel stories of sexual violation – Lurie’s harassment of his coloured student Melanie Isaacs in the first half of the novel, and the gang rape of his daughter Lucy in the second half – the novel ‘sets up an internal debate on what it means adequately to respond to an experience of disgrace and bodily violation for perpetrator as well as for victim.’143 Despite winning two international awards, the Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, since its publication in 1999, Disgrace has attracted a mixed reception ranging from hostility and accusations of racism because of its pessimistic portrayal of post-apartheid racial relations, to deeper explorations which unveil the paradox faced by the white South African writer. Jane Poyner, indeed, observes that Coeztee’s central concern in both his fiction and his critical works reflects the postcolonial struggle between ‘narrativising the lost or silenced (hi)stories of the oppressed (black) Other’ and the risk of ‘assuming the authoritative (and hence, by analogy, colonialist) stance [he seeks] to challenge.’144 His preoccupation with the peril of imposing his white, Afrikaner, colonising perspective on the (hi)stories of the Other is, in fact, reflected in his slippery language and constant questioning of authorial authorship.
The African National Congress’s oral submission to the South African Human Rights Commission’s Inquiry into Racism in the Media on 5 April 2000, perhaps, represents one of the most significant examples of a racialised reading of the novel. According to Peter McDonald, the ANC employed Coetzee’s text ‘as an historical
142 J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, 2nd ed. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1999; London: Vintage, 2000), 162.
Citations refer to the Vintage edition. Subsequent citations will be given directly in the text, with bracketed page numbers and preceded by the abbreviation D.
143 Elleke Boehmer, ‘Not Saying Sorry, Not Speaking Pain: Gender Implications in Disgrace,’
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4, no. 3 (2002): 344.
144 Jane Poyner, ‘Truth and Reconciliation in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,’ Scrutinity 2: Issues in English
witness to the persistence of racism among white South Africans’ because it portrayed the Black as a ‘“faithless, immoral, uneducated, incapacitated primitive child,” a version of white racism they traced back to J. B. M. Hertzog, the father of “so-called pure Afrikaner nationalism.”’145 This observation apparently alludes to David Lurie’s description of Pollux, the youngest of David’s daughter Lucy’s black rapists: ‘a violent child in the body of a young man […] Deficient. Mentally deficient. Morally deficient’ (D 207-208). The ANC’s criticism was echoed by other commentators and reviewers; Jakes Gerwel, professor and Director General of the President’s office under Nelson Mandela, for instance, expressed his dismay at the novel’s portrayal of the ‘almost barbaric post-colonial claims of Black Africans,’ at its representation of ‘mixed-race [bruin] characters’ as ‘whores, seducers, complainers, conceited accusers’, and at its ‘exclusion of the possibility of civilized reconciliation.’146
With regard to the ANC’s submission to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), David Attwell emphasises that their reading of Disgrace ‘is
racialized beyond a level that is warranted in the text of the novel.’147 He in turn
proposes a reading which ‘contains and sublimates race,’ embedded ‘into larger patterns of historical and ethical interpretation.’148 My own reading of the novel shows how the author is primarily interested in the ethical complexities of representing rape and sexual violence on women, alongside engaging with racial implications. Carine M. Mardorossian, in fact, suggests that Coetzee’s undertaking challenges ‘normative approaches to rape, justice, and human relationship,’ and, instead of confining post- apartheid violence to racial frameworks, the author highlights ‘the inextricable relation between incommensurable categories of identity such as gender, class, or ethnicity in the application of legal and moral authority.’149 Without explicitly referring to the work of the TRC, Coetzee’s novel, however, also poses questions about both the effective representability of sexual harm on women and the existence of a suitable listener/reader for these stories of female abuses in the context of transitional South Africa, two issues which focused the Commission’s attention as I have discussed in my first chapter.
145 Peter McDonald, ‘Disgrace Effects,’ Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4,
no. 3 (2002): 323.
146 Ibid., 325. 147 Ibid., 333. 148 Ibid., 340.
149Carine M. Mardorossian, ‘Rape and the Violence of Representation in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,’
From the very beginning of the novel, the protagonist, David Lurie, fifty-two years old and twice divorced, is presented as an outcast, a man alienated both from his society and work, a man ‘out of touch, out of date’ (D 13). Once professor of modern languages, particularly fascinated by English Romanticism, he has become adjunct professor of communications at the Cape Town Technical University following ‘the great rationalisation’ (D 3) of his department. Although he is allowed to teach a special- field course a year (Romantic poets), ‘because that is good for morale’ (D 3), for the rest he teaches without passion Communications 101 and Communication 201, making ‘no impression on students. They look through him when he speaks, forget his name’ (D 4). His masters have been Wordsworth and Byron, ‘his imaginative domain is one of classical myth and learning, people with gods and angels and heroes and devils. His cosmography is Dantean or Miltonic, with heaven and hell, Eden and an underworld.’150 However, when David gives a class on Byron’s poem Lara, he is not able to arouse his students’ interest: ‘heads bent, they scribble down his words. Byron, Lucifer, Cain, it is all the same to them’ (D 34). A couple of pages earlier, he even depicts his students as ‘post-Christian, posthistorical, postliterate, they might as well have been hatched from eggs yesterday’ (D 32). Lurie, therefore, appears to have a cultural legacy to transmit, but it is one that his students have no interest in, and this contributes to his marginalised state.
His passion for Romantic poetry is indicative of Lurie’s character and, in a sense, prophetic of his behaviour. In his career as a scholar, he has written three poorly received critical works, including Wordsworth and the burden of the past. In the South African context, the word ‘burden’ inevitably assumes a remarkable significance in relation to the burden of guilt experienced by white liberal South Africans, like Coetzee and David Lurie, for their ‘unwilling’ complicity in their country’s history of violence during apartheid. However, later in his career, Lurie now chooses to turn ‘his academic eye towards the life and work of the scabrous Byron,’151 which establishes an implicit connection between Byron’s libertine life and the protagonist’s promiscuity. His lechery is also anticipated in the opening sentence of the novel, where the third-person narrator hints at the protagonist’s problem of sex: ‘For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well’ (D 1). Besides referring to
150 Deirdre Coleman, ‘The “Dog-Man”: Race, Sex, Species, and Lineage in Coetzee’s Disgrace,’ Twenty-
Century Literature 55, no. 4 (2009): 607.
Thomas Hardy’s preface to his novel Jude the Obscure,152 this statement introduces Lurie’s solution to his ‘problem of sex’, namely his weekly visits to the ‘exotic’ prostitute Soraya, whose photograph in Discreet Escorts’s book depicts her with ‘a red passion-flower in her hair and the faintest of lines at the corners of her eyes’ (D 7). Whatever the uncertainty with which Soraya’s racial identity is indicated, her ‘honey- brown body, unmarked by the sun’ (D 1) clearly classifies the woman as non-white. Sohinee Roy highlights the importance of Disgrace’s opening paragraph which signals the new direction undertaken in post-apartheid South Africa: in this new context, interracial sexual relations are no longer prohibited.153
The narrative structure deployed in the novel consists of a third-person narrator whose focaliser is Lurie’s perspective; the use of the present tense throughout the text also ‘adds to the immediacy and proximity with which the protagonist’s viewpoint is represented.’154 Everything is seen through Lurie’s eyes, and, as readers, we are led to sympathise and agree with Lurie’s actions and his ‘readings’ of those actions – such as, for instance, his sexual act with the coloured student Melanie that I discuss later –, which are affected by his hegemonic position as a male and Afrikaner. The description of Lurie as an outcast within his own community, though, positions him on the edge of that dominant power, thus creating an interesting contrast, which alerts readers to the ‘potential’ unreliability and bias of Lurie’s viewpoint. To this end, there are also some linguistic clues in the narrative, which expose the disjunction between the authorial voice and Lurie’s perception of reality. For example, the phrase ‘to his mind’ in the opening sentence, or the expression ‘To some degree, he believes, his affection is reciprocated’ (D 2),155 conveys a certain degree of discrepancy between the narrator and Lurie as the narrative focaliser, encouraging readers to distance themselves from the protagonist’s perspective. Concentrating on an analysis of verbal aspects and tenses of the novel, Mark Sanders also places particular emphasis on the phrase ‘to his mind’
152 Coleman observes that in his preface to the novel, Hardy mentions ‘the problem of sex’, defining it ‘as
the “deadly war waged between flesh and spirit.”’ The scholar carries on arguing that ‘Hardy’s dark novel’ enacts ‘a fictional universe dominated by the tragedy of the sexual instinct’. As I discuss shortly, Lurie will become a victim of his own sexual instincts as well. Coleman, ‘The “Dog-Man”: Race, Sex, Species, and Lineage in Coetzee’s Disgrace,’ 600-601.
153 While during apartheid, both the Immorality Act (1950-1985) and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages
Act (1949-1985) forbade any kind of sexual relationship between white and non-white people. See Sohinee Roy, ‘Speaking with a Forked Tongue: Disgrace and the Irony of Reconciliation in Post- Apartheid South Africa,’ Modern Fiction Studies 58, no. 4 (2012): 702.
154 Mardorossian, ‘Rape and the Violence of Representation in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,’ 78.
155 This quotation from Disgrace refers to Lurie’s opinion about his relationship with the prostitute
which, by separating the auxiliary verb ‘have’ from its participle ‘solved’, affects the perfective aspect of the verb phrase:
Indicating transcendent aspect, the perfective ‘has solved’ secures the narrative present. Before its syntax can be completed, however, the perfective is sundered by an aside alerting the reader that the action narrated is not over – that, as the narrator gently intimates by splitting ‘has solved’ in two with the words ‘to his mind’, the solution Lurie imagines himself to have found [for his problem of sex] is premature.156
The prematurity and incompleteness of Lurie’s solution to his problem of sex – that is, his weekly encounter with a non-white prostitute – is also reinforced through the use of the present tense in the following two sentences of the novel’s opening paragraph: ‘On Thursday afternoons he drives to Green Point. Punctually at two p.m. he presses the buzzer at the entrance to Windsor Mansions, speaks his name, and enters’ (D 1). Sanders argues that the iterative aspect enshrined in the present tense of these verbs ‘retroactively permit[s] one to read the perfective “has solved” as iterative: indicating habitual action, not the completed action it typically indicates.’157 In addition to providing some insights into Lurie’s character, these syntactic clues are also important in terms of narrative strategy, because they invite readers to be alert and question the effective reliability of both the narrator and the narrative focaliser. From the outset of the novel, Coetzee thus deploys a narrative strategy which hints at the possibility for the narration to be incomplete or flawed in a certain sense, rather than claiming authenticity or factual objectiveness, which in turn indicates a much more ambivalent and complex approach to the question of ‘truth-telling’ than that on which the TRC relied.
Lurie’s overwhelming willingness to indulge his sexual appetite, far from being under control, leads him to sexually abuse one of his students from his Romantic course: Melanie Isaacs. Similarly to Soraya, Coetzee does not resort to apartheid racial terminology to classify Melanie’s identity, but from the novel’s description of her features, we can clearly deduce that Melanie belongs to the coloured community: ‘she is small and thin, with close-cropped black hair, wide, almost Chinese cheekbones, large, dark eyes’ (D 11), familiar signifiers to describe the ‘cape’ coloured population. Lurie also gives her a new name ‘Melàni: the dark one’ (D 18) which hints at her non-white identity. Roy places an emphasis on this ‘relative’ absence of specific racial markers, arguing that ‘the racial silence in Disgrace identifies the racial ideology and practice of
156 Mark Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing, 172-173. 157 Ibid.
“new South Africa” with David Goldberg’s concept of the postracial.’158 According to Roy, the ‘post-apartheid fear of racial reference’ must be ascribed to apartheid abuse of the racial category as a divisive classifier which aimed to secure white privilege. Supporting Goldberg’s assessment, she claims that ‘postracial racelessness signals the suppression of race instead of its disappearance.’159 Roy’s study discloses the complex entanglements behind racial and sexual dynamics, which were created by the apartheid regime and a history of colonisation but still affect the post-apartheid South African present. Coetzee’s stylistic choice also shows his awareness of the shortcomings of language itself to represent the Other without the risk of inscribing both Melanie and, as we have seen above, Soraya into a fixed category still loaded with racist symbolism.
Lurie’s behaviour, however, perfectly exemplifies the complex complicity between sexual desire and racial power, which is mirrored in the description of all the ‘sexual acts’ between the man and Melanie. They are, indeed, portrayed through the professor’s viewpoint as being the main focaliser, and these descriptions result in a general suppression of the girl’s perspective and emotions:
On the living-room floor, to the sound of rain pattering against the windows, he makes love to her. Her body is clear, simple, in its way perfect; though she is passive throughout, he finds the act pleasurable, so pleasurable that from its climax he tumbles into blank oblivion. When he comes back the rain has stopped. The girl is lying beneath him, her eyes closed, her hands slack above her head, a slight frown on her face.[…] Averting her face, she frees herself, gathers her things, leaves the room. (D 19)
He has given her no warning; she is too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her. When he takes her in his arms, her limbs crumple like a marionette’s. Words heavy as clubs thud into the delicate whorl of her ear. ‘No, not now!’ she says, struggling. ‘My cousin will be back!’ But nothing will stop him. He carries her to the bedroom, brushes off the absurd sleepers […] She does not resist. All she does is avert herself: avert her lips, avert her eyes. She lets him lay her out on the bed and undress her: she even helps him, raising her arms and then her hips. […]
Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As
though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. (D 24-25, emphasis added)
These two quotations make reference to two different sexual encounters between Lurie and Melanie, and, on both occasions, the repulsion and unwillingness the girl’s body
158 Roy, ‘Speaking with a Forked Tongue: Disgrace and the Irony of Reconciliation in Post-Apartheid
South Africa,’ 702.
expresses are quite manifest: ‘All she does is avert herself’ (D 25). Nevertheless, Lurie is reluctant to call his act ‘rape’ – despite being conscious of Melanie’s aversion – and his dominant perspective, Mardorossian underlines, brings the reader ‘into an uncomfortable proximity to and complicity with the white masculinist subject’s way of thinking.’160 Lurie’s dominant viewpoint epitomises both the colonising and patriarchal discourses which entrap the female subaltern voice of Melanie, ‘the dark one.’
Lucy Graham also remarks that ‘Lurie’s misuse of Melanie exposes power operating at the level of gender and at an institutional level’161 acknowledging Coetzee’s willingness to look into a very common characteristic in contemporary South Africa, that is, more and more cases of gender harassment and rape in campus life.162 Lurie’s sexual abuse of Melanie even acquires a ‘darker’ connotation – if it is possible in a case of rape – when the text suggests a distressing association between the student and Lucy, Lurie’s daughter, as it is evident in the subsequent quotations:
He makes up a bed for her in his daughter’s room, kisses her good night, leaves her to herself. (D 26)
He sits down on the bed, draws her to him. In his arms she begins to sob miserably. Despite all, he feels a tingling of desire. ‘There, there,’ he whispers, trying to comfort her. ‘Tell me what is wrong.’ Almost he says, ‘Tell Daddy what is wrong.’ (D 26)
He strokes her hair, kisses her forehead. Mistress? Daughter? What, in her heart, is she trying to be? What is she offering him? (D 27)
The implicit allusion to incest might be interpreted as an aggravating circumstance of David’s behaviour, which makes his account ‘not rape, not quite that’ (D 25) no longer reliable to the reader’s eyes. His perverse desire for a woman who makes him think of his daughter serves as a warning for readers. Indeed, alerted by this disturbing association, and by those narrative clues that I have discussed earlier, the reader cannot escape the sensation that what David did to Melanie is illicit – the same way it would be illicit if Lucy were in the girl’s place – and, as such, it must be called in the proper way, rape, regardless of his contrary claims.
160 Mardorossian, ‘Rape and the Violence of Representation in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,’ 78.
161 Lucy Valerie Graham, ‘Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,’ Journal of
Southern African Studies 29, no. 2 (2003): 437-438.
Notably, the two classes of Romantic poetry that Lurie teaches echo this feeling of wrongdoing. Analysing Wordsworth’s passage about the Alps, from Book 6 of The
Prelude, he lingers on the verb ‘usurp upon’, reminding the students that ‘usurp upon
means to intrude or encroach upon. Usurp, to take over entirely, is the perfective of
usurp upon; usurping completes the act of usurp upon’ (D 21). This preference for the
verb ‘usurp upon’ over the perfective ‘usurp’ unmistakably recalls Lurie’s ‘intrusion’ into Melanie’s body, signifying, on the one hand, the girl’s reluctance for the sexual act, and, on the other hand, Lurie’s intention to carry on this unwelcome relationship. Following Melanie’s boyfriend’s threatening visit, Lurie teaches a class on Lord Byron’s poem Lara, A Tale (1814), which is meaningful at different levels. First, the reference to Byron and his scandalous life forecasts the shameful future that awaits Lurie:
‘We continue with Byron,’ he says, plunging into his notes. ‘As we saw last