Disgrace
by J. M. Coetzee; a Response.
Juanita Rice
SPOILER ALERT: This discussion talks generally about the
ending of the novel Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee, formerly a writer in
South Africa. I want to discuss
questions raised by the book, or questions of what I think the book expresses
that is morally incomprehensible to me.
Since in all modernist fables the moral is framed in the ending, I have
to refer to it in a general way.
BACKGROUND & OVERVIEW
J. M. Coetzee is a
distinguished and well-respected novelist of powerfully dramatic stories, a
winner of several literary awards and finally, four years after the 1999 publication
of Disgrace, of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Disgrace is
powerful writing indeed, although that which is 'dramatic' seems somewhat
arbitrarily produced. Most of all, however,
the book seems to be a protest against social changes in societies since the
1960s, say.
The narrator is an older white male professor in South Africa, who
loses his job and reputation because of an unwelcome sexual relationship he
establishes with a student and then who is present during an attack on his
daughter at her farm. The attackers are
"black" African men.
So from
the very get-go, the book is focused on unhappy relationships between white
men, white women and black men from the point of view of a white man whose
social powers and privileges have been diminished by social change. Such a book invites questions since these
relationships are so fraught with conflict, contestatory ideology and political
power in the new 21st century.
(The book was first published in 1999.) N.B. Since its publication
Coetzee has emigrated from South Africa to Australia: is it because
natives of Australia have not been significantly admitted into social power? Is
it fair to see the novel's questions as the author's?
THE STORY
The narrator, Professor
David Lurie, is divorced and the book opens with his meditations upon
finding himself 'adequately served' by
weekly visits to an elegant and anonymous call-girl. But when he uses his
position and a wily strategy to overcome a female student's resistance to sexual seduction, he lands in trouble with a sexual harassment charge, which he
will never see as justified. His career
is blighted, his reputation badly damaged, and he retreats to a country farm
where his unmarried and 'liberated' daughter lives, and where he is not very
welcome.
Then two black African men attack the farm in an orgy of
violence, and his daughter, it seems to him, "knuckles under" and refuses
to lodge a police complaint. Finally, he tries to divert his despair and
bitterness writing a 'chamber opera' about the poet Lord Byron; specifically,
about his affair with a young married woman in Italy. It is a poem which will celebrate the glory of
male desire, and (which is unspoken) great white mature male desire. Failure and frustration ensue: the great Byron Voice he imagines fails to
illuminate his creative efforts. What he
finds himself writing, instead, is the voice of what becomes of the mistress
after Byron dies. ("You'll be sorry
after I die," is the adolescent psychological dream-theme here, it seems.)
And the mistress persona he begins to speak from is a woman "past her
prime, with nothing to look forward to."
My question is this: What
is it that male writers like Coetzee fail to understand about rape, gender
power and sex? Or, to be generous, how
do they understand it so differently than I do? And fail throughout the novel, from beginning
to end, to see the character of the professor as anything other than
victim. Of women, of the confusing and
oppressive new philosophies, of Afro* peoples.
I am going to use the tags “Euro” and “Afro” to designate old color line
differences because I want to steer clear of the color labels “white” and
“black,” especially in dealing with characters in Africa. By using the label "Euro," I am
continually alluding to the source of the race 'problem' as European Colonialism,
beginning in the 1400s. When we say
"white" race and "black" race, we refer to a present state
of affairs without seeing it connected to the systematic source of racial and
ethnic prejudice.
It may also be germane to understanding this novel to
explain that “Communication Studies” here is used to represent everything in pedagogy
which conservative (and mostly male)
professors view as "debased subjects," a point that non-academics may
miss. Coetzee uses this homely but fairly bland-sounding course label in order
to avoid the political point of what types of courses are most ardently opposed
by conservatives like Professor Lurie.
If Coetzee had used the example of cultural studies, discourse studies,
gender studies, or ethnic studies, the 'political' point would have been more obvious. On the other hand, it certainly would not
have been appropriate to appoint this uneducated professor to the teaching of
those quite-analytical disciplines. And
although conservatives find studies of gender, race, ethnicity, discourse
theory and cultural analysis anathema, they cannot label them as pablum,
whereas there is no dearth of professors who have a rather disdainful attitude
to Com Studies. The "pedestrian and egalitarian" discipline of Com
Studies has actually been a good dumping place for outmoded teachers in undesirable
disciplines as the world shifts gears, and is a good example of the cosmic and
sometimes comical counterpoint to Romantic Poetry studies which epitomized the "glorious
genius of Western Civ" which, in the view on that side of the aisle, value
“only the best” in human culture: dead
white male poets from Greece in 350 BC onwards. That's a tremendously baroque sentence but it
is an understatement of the resentful rage and Manichean vision typical in the
Culture Wars. I'll also plead guilty to a slightly Manichean tendency in myself
as I find the "old privileged Eurocentric guys'" irretrievably
outdated, I hope.
In the plot of Disgrace, the seduced female student starts
missing Professor Lurie's classes and trying to avoid him until at last she files
a sexual harassment charge. Since he is obdurate to the moral code he is
accused of violating, he takes a martyr’s stand, announcing only (and airily):
“I plead guilty to whatever she said.”
This way he thinks he is being chivalrous to the girl and posing himself
as a noble figure. Or at least retaining his prominent dignity. Inwardly he
thinks the faculty committee investigating the charge is petty and
malicious. He believes he is the one
being harassed, especially by a female professor in his department.
One expects (I expected) the character to wise up in the
course of the plot, or to break down.
No. Not in this book. Can we understand why it was written this way
other than in the end to indemnify the man as the victim of a decadent new
culture?
For the new Africa continues to victimize him at every turn. Literally, Professor Lurie is assaulted by
Afro thugs who set him on fire and rape his daughter, loot her farm, and kill her dogs in a particularly cold and
brutal way. A writer could not concoct a much more powerful image of
"motiveless savagery.” In the aftermath, his daughter will not file
charges and he understands her motive only as a misconceived guilt-complex, a
symptom of the incomprehensible new post-colonialism (if he would name it). Her
behavior seems to him to say only that all Euro peoples should submit to
violation as revenge for their purported historical sins (i.e., four hundred
years of brutal colonialization).
He
broods on his noble and refined life being smeared with such incomprehensible
accusations.
And, oh, by the way, Lurie seduces a married woman who is
his daughter’s best friend. His ex-wife
is often scathing in her criticism but
he continues to meet with her as—it seems—his only friend. Coetzee, it seems to me, draws a
characterization here which is heavily weighted toward sympathizing with Lurie
in his rational responses to her caustic criticisms. Did the author only include her as further
evidence of the incomprehensibility of women?
For there is nothing I can see in David Lurie's character that is consistent with continuing to have
lunch with an unfriendly ex-wife.
To top everything off, Lurie inexplicably goes to visit the
family of the college girl he seduced. Why
does he seek them out? Do they let him come to dinner because they expect him
to be contrite and ‘make things right’?
Instead, he behaves in a completely irrational way with them. Instead of a word of apology, he silently
performs an explicable ritualistic kowtow, kneeling with forehead to floor,
terrifying the girl’s mother and sister.
Does Coetzee expect the reader to comprehend this man’s
perspective? I did not.
For Lurie stubbornly clings
to his Euro patriarchal principles, i.e., the European values that justify subjugation
of anyone not a European male (and even a good portion of those who are). Is
this a book about the poor put-upon patriarch and his justifiable sense of
well-deserved natural privilege trodden on at every turn?
It is, I think, a book which is part of the white male
backlash that, for instance, drives the Neo-Conservative struggle of the Fox
Network/Koch Bros to turn time back toward their days of Unchallenged Privilege
and Control. Coetzee, a Euro-African--now
living in Euro-Australia by the way-- appears to identify completely with every
resentment and bafflement of his hero. The novel’s strange opening—introducing
Professor Lurie as the patron of an elegant prostitute who unaccountably
refuses to continue to see him after meeting him in public—seems little
designed to help us understand him the way he wants to see himself: as a
romantic man who is a noble servant of male desire, surely a vital and valuable
force. That is, his violation of a girl
student is an expression of the free flow of male virility seen in western
literature as glorious. His stated
self-justification is that a man's urge to copulate is a noble masculine
impetus of the spirit.
I was continually troubled by the absence of any sense that
Coetzee intended to show or understand the narrator's viewpoint as ethically
compromised. Lurie thinks he has done
nothing wrong. His daughter's behavior
after the attack and rape is utterly incomprehensible to him. Lucy insists that
her decision not to report the rape to the police is “a purely private matter.”
When he accuses her of deluding herself that if she doesn’t report then she
will have “a safe conduct” in the future, Lucy interrupts: “I am not just trying to save my skin. . .you
miss the point entirely.”
But as a reader, so did I. And I am a rape survivor too. At
no point does Coetzee illuminate her reaction, even for me. Does Coetzee conceal her rationale to make us
more sympathetic to her father’s non-comprehension? To paint a story of the Euro male professor
in contemporary South Africa whose ex-wife, daughter, prostitute, female
department chair, a seduced student, and a current “mistress” are all
antagonists without letting the reader see what motivates any of them, the
women in this book, is to be complicit with the slogan “Who knows what women
want?” And then to show all the Afro
characters as equally sinister and "inscrutable" (the standard
Westerner's imperialist accusion) leaves me as baffled as the Professor in the
story, if not more so. I do not
understand Coetzee.
American writer Louise Erdrich, in a recent novel The
Round House, uses an adolescent boy as narrator, and still she manages to
illuminate a female rape victim's similar reaction. But she found the creative means to let a narrator be non-comprehending and
yet to allow the reader sympathetic understanding, so I know it can be
done. My question is whether Coetzee's
talent fails him here, or whether what I experience as a fault is in fact his
male blindness.
The novel gets murkier.
Lurie tries to evade his dark despair by trying to write an opera about
Byron and his potent sexual affair with the younger and married girl in
Italy. And here things get provokingly
complicated from my point of view. Lurie cannot find a “melodic voice” for
Byron himself, but only a projected voluptuous craving in the voice of the girl, a voice of longing for
the passionate lovemaking that lifted her from a mundane domestic arrangement
into something rapturous and sublime.
Is this symbolic for the idea that a creative man looks for a
woman’s voice that expresses his own values? And the only woman's voice which
meets masculine expectations is a woman's voice created by another man? M. Butterfly? , for instance? But also
relevant is the fact that Coetzee cannot find a voice for any of the Afro
characters in his plot. Why do the men attack
Lucy? Who are they? Is her former employee really malicious and
sinister because one of the attackers, the ‘young’ one, is his wife’s
brother? For in the end a friendly Afro
man who is farming nearby, does get Lucy’s property since she can no longer use
it profitably. She gets only her house as her private area. It's an explicit
agreement, and almost explicitly a protection racket.
Ex-professor Lurie, in attempting to make sense of his life, sees his
punishment at the university as a cultural expression of trying to make unnatural
the literary (Greek) trope of the marriage of Cronus and Harmony. “That was what the trial was set up to
punish.” He was “on trial for his way of
life.” Lurie continues: “For unnatural
acts: for broadcasting old seed, seed that does not quicken, contra naturam."
He finds another justification: it’s an unfair struggle of young males
against old males. (The female student’s boyfriend harasses Lurie.) He thinks he’s being discarded because he’s
old: “if the old men hog the young women, what will be the future of the
species?” Is this intentionally a piggish way to look
at relations between men and women? He
characterizes his university trial as accusing him of violating a prohibition
on old “seed.”
That, at bottom, was the case for the
prosecution. Half of literature is about
it: young women struggling to escape
from under the weight of old men, for the sake of the species.
Well, it’s a fair description of "Western Lit." Think of Zeus and all his
rapes and abductions. When you label the king-god Cronos (Zeus’ father) you can
see the metaphor as “old men” in symmetry with labeling old women as Crones.
But the young women’s struggles are not for the sake of the species, nor just
of youth against age, but struggles of a person against assault. For the sake of choice, freedom, autonomy,
safety, integrity: take your pick. The
rapist is not performing a propagative act, but an assault and violation. An expression of hatred and contempt. “We” know this. I.E., we women and feminists and civil rights
campaigners know this.
Coetzee actually
knows it. In another book, The Heart of the Country,
there is evidence that Coetzee sees the contempt of the male character who
brutalizes the female characters as springing from anger and resentment; in
that novel the man is an Afro former servant of the Euro daughter/owner. When
she becomes powerless to continue to oppress him and begins to fear him, he is
free to enact his hatred. His revenge
for decades of emasculation of Afro men by Euro men and women.
Therefore, NOT all “literature”
but a good half of it, is about women being victimized by men; that much
is true. And the literature rarely
depicts it as victimization but, as
Professor Lurie sees it, as the natural expression of noble desire. I.E., love, right? Euro novels previous to 1970, say, incorporate such deadening sexism that often the "Great Titles" are unreadable to many of us. Jack Kerouac, On the Road; Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, for starters.
But the values of western literature are not universal values; it's just that if you were educated in the Europhile tradition from 1700 to 1980, it seemed "universal" because it was all you could find at the "university." From the Greeks
to the moderns, women (and slaves) are explicitly, per Aristotle, not
appropriate subjects for heroic depiction.
They can be powerful but that will inevitably spring from being evil,
and probably supernatural: from Medea
and Clytaemnestra and Medusa and the Erinyes to the wicked Witch of the east,
the cruel stepmother, all the way to bad fairies. (An aside I can’t resist here
is to point to the rehabilitation of these symbols in such cartoons as Schrek
and Maleficent, and Super-Power films like Snow White and the Huntsman
in which the wicked queen is portrayed as the victim of a cruel spell against
which she struggles in vain. And the one
film which most of all inverted the Road Buddy film, Thelma and Louise,
in which the female heroes have to die, just like all the fallen women of
Victorian drama, but which evoked such an outcry of men feeling that the movie
encouraged women to murder men.) (Sorry
for the digression.) (Not really sorry.)
If this point of view is new to
you, I don’t know what to say. I cannot
possibly summarize all the stunning Post-Colonial re-visioning of that
literature and mythology which had been valorized globally since the
Renaissance. Need we specify European Renaissance? Yes, we should. Precisely because it is so
widely taught and referred to as “THE” Renaissance, when actually what is being
born is only the initial discovery stage of the values and virtues of European
invasions and aggression against all the “non-Euro” world. When Italian, French, Spanish, English (and
later Belgian and Dutch) feudal nations (monarchies) discovered how to make
money by subjugating others--imperialism at first, an old imperialism like
Roman Empire--but eventually, more profitably, by colonizing: permanently
supplanting and exploiting the people of other places and cultures. Notably not described as other “nations”
since those other persons were probably not capable of such progressive
concepts. Inferior, tour court.
If Lurie were right about all
sex being based on the undeniable male urge to procreate, then his attempts to
“sow his seed,” of course, were as blameless as the biological imperatives for men,
and he can justifiably feel victimized for simply being old. Not for his
violation of a position of power as her professor, not for his arrogant belief
that his potent desire (“a fire burning”) entitled him to manipulate her into
his sexual embraces.
As for Lucy, she eventually
opens up a little more to her father, at least enough to say that the robbery
and killing of the dogs was probably incidental, that the men’s main intent had
been rape—rape with “such hatred.”
I think they have done it before. I think that they are rapists first and
foremost. Stealing things is just
incidental. A side-line. I think they do
rape.
She continues, addressing her
father as always by his first name:
When it comes to men and sex, David,
nothing surprises me any more. Maybe,
for men, hating women makes sex more exciting.
You are a man, you ought to know.
(I want, here, to quote a series of lines
in the book:)
He remembers, as a child, poring over the
word rape in newspaper reports,
trying
to puzzle out what exactly it meant.
David remembers the painting The Rape
of the Sabine Women
What he suspected rape to be: the man
lying on top of the woman and
pushing himself into her?
He thinks of Byron. Surely some of the many women [Byron] pushed
himself into would have called it rape.
“You don’t understand,” David is told by
Lucy and by her friend Bev. [But]
he does understand; he can, if he
concentrates, if he loses himself, be there,
be the men, inhabit them, fill them with the ghost of himself. The question is:
does he have it in him to be
the woman?
Meanwhile the forcibly retired
professor has been trying to write his chamber opera about the mature
Byron. “Byron in Italy” he thinks of
calling it. As he works on it, the opera comes to be about Byron’s
“bitch-mate,” his Italian mistress Teresa Guiccioli. At first “he can find words for Byron but the
Teresa that history [his-story, his-version] has bequeathed him—young, greedy,
willful, petulant—does not match up to the music he has dreamed of…” That music
he characterizes as music with “harmonies lushly autumnal yet edged with
irony.” So he tries to imagine her in middle age: “a dumpy little widow,” with
Byron long dead and her obsessed with the mythicality of her famous lover. She is heavy and stocky, peasant-like, with
an overheated complexion and “attacks of asthma that leave her heaving for
breath. Without Byron she is nothing, a
woman past her prime.”
Does David Lurie the character, or
does Coetzee the writer, recognize the pitifulness of this pretense to create a
pitiful woman who is nothing without the man who used and abused her, this
imagined figure, David’s self-important Priapic-Patriarch projection of all the
women he has used and left behind? His worship of his own penis-impulses, a
weak pretense that he has been the brief moment of glory in the life of every
woman—wives, prostitutes, girls, other men’s wives and daughter in his long
sexual history. The only glory he can at
this point imagine is the man who has been disgraced by history, as he
sees it, a picture of himself having been the lone Lover, even if (like Byron)
he only indulged his own sexual appetites and “enriched” himself in each
encounter.
Or does he also imagine his “old
age” as blighting him and making him like the Teresa he imagines, past his prime
and without prospects, thus longing for his young passionate flamboyantly
romantic self, his Byron persona, his youth, all his western-civ being. But dead Byron’s vocal music is, for him, in
his chamber-play faint, vague, directionless.
And finally, David’s (or
Coetzee’s) imaginings of male glory are of “entering” as a matter of mating, a
matter of giving (as if of a precious commodity) seed. He confuses the Romantic era’s male poses as
somehow consistent with his Spencer-esque Social Darwin image of (white) male
mastery as a service to the species.
How can an accomplished author
write a book like this and not be pilloried for such apologia for the last four
hundred years of aggressive exploitation on the part of white male “mastery”?
Can I add to all this the fact
that he finally can picture to himself the whole violent attack on his
daughter, on himself as her old man defender, and on all that she loves, as
merely a consequence of the male need to propagate? That is to say, the rapists were “enriching”
her with the gift of seed. I cannot
reconcile myself to an imagination so far from my own understanding of race and
gender relations.
Such a potentially provocative
book, and by that I mean, provoking thought and challenging accepted imagery,
and such a murky project in the end. I
am puzzled and would welcome comments (pitched in a tone of discussion and not
accusatory diatribes, thank you). If you can explain this book to me in a way
that eases my discomfort and assuages my incredulity, please do. I promise that
any comment which only attacks my stupidity or my Feminazi 'political
correctness' will receive precisely the attention and the response it deserves.
