Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee (2)

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 21^st 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.