A Bone To Pick: J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

Set in a turn-of-the-Millennium South Africa flirting with social collapse, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (Penguin, 1999) deals with messy social issues in a sloppy way. When this novel came out almost a decade ago, it was lauded for its morally complex depiction of race, sex, and class. But the problem with Disgrace is that its moral vision is rooted in a social world whose problems are much more serious and convoluted than its author seems to know.

Professor David Lurie head-butts his way through an embarrassing "affair" with an 18-year-old student. He lures Melanie over to his place for a simple tagliatelle with mushroom sauce and few paragraphs of one-sided Wordsworth-based discussion, and before he knows it he’s forced his way into her apartment and forced sex on her, all the while invoking Eros, to whom he, lover of beauty, feels he must be true. "A mistake, a huge mistake," he realizes immediately. "Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core."

David flees to his daughter, Lucy, who lives on a smallholding in the cold, wild, Eastern Cape. It isn’t a safe place, as David and Lucy soon find out; several days after David arrives, three black men invade their house, killing the dogs Lucy keeps, raping Lucy, and driving away in David’s car. David and Lucy’s relationship, formerly close, crumbles under the stress of this trauma, and it only gets worse when Lucy refuses to report the rape to the police, calling it "purely a private matter."

Awkwardly absorbing himself into Lucy’s small community, David frets about Lucy, sleeps with an ugly middle-aged woman as a kind of punishment to himself ("After the sweet young flesh of Melanie Isaacs, this is what I have come to"), and volunteers at an animal shelter, really laying it on thick by performing the miserable task of putting abandoned dogs to sleep.

Lest anyone’s erudition go wasted, David’s also writing an opera about Lord Byron. In one scene, after another sad conversation with Lucy, he considers Byron. "Among the legions of countesses and kitchenmaids Byron pushed himself into there were no doubt those who called it rape. But none surely had cause to fear that the session would end with her throat being slit. From where he stands, from where Lucy stands, Byron looks very old-fashioned indeed." Here is a moral vision that judges rape by degrees; a man so sure of himself and his actions that Coetzee frees him from the questionable nature of his own actions in a single sentence sentence – "not rape, not quite that."

As I tick off David’s faults, it starts to seem as though Coetzee has put David up for our judgment. But because Coetzee’s third-person narration moves seamlessly into David’s thoughts, and because of David’s self-awareness, his love of beauty, his intellectual rigor – "he has never been afraid to follow a thought down its winding path" (which, if I hadn’t been told, I wouldn’t have known, despite all these pages spent with him) – it feels we’re being asked to identify with David, nudged away from following down their winding paths our own condemnations of him.

Which makes certain scenes baffling, such as the one in which David, on returning to Cape Town, bumps into the head of his former department at the grocery store. David stands behind her in line and "takes some pleasure in observing as she unloads her purchases on to the counter: not only the bread and butter items but the little treats that a woman living alone awards herself – full cream ice cream (real almonds, real raisins), imported Italian cookies, chocolate bars – as well as a pack of sanitary napkins." David has catapulted himself out of society; he is an outcast, and he’s enjoying the discomfort his presence causes members of his former life, I’ll give him that. But what is the reader to make of the satisfaction David takes in reminding himself that his successful counterpart is just "a woman living alone," eating pathetic chocolate treats, having her period like some kind of comeuppance for pre-Menopausal professional success?

In this book, men act and women are acted upon. Coetzee is so close to David that we never learn what David looks like, even as we get a down-and-dirty description of every woman he sees. There is a leering quality to these descriptions, especially since their personalities are a collection of cultural stereotypes. We’ve got the sexy schoolgirl with "neat, perfect little breasts" whose no really means sorta; the sassy ex-wife ("Don’t expect sympathy from me, David, and don’t expect sympathy from anyone else either."); the fat, lesbian, feminist daughter.

Coetzee is performing the literary equivalent of hooting at these women from his car, never slowing down to find out what their voices sound like. Including breathing, thinking female characters would have separated Coetzee’s voice from David’s; we would have been able to see that even if David can’t think of women as real, Coetzee can. As it is, I can’t untangle Coetzee from David, and the prospect that I’ve just put myself in the hands of a novelist who shares David’s moral landscape is, as David would say, very troubling indeed.

Another of the author’s strange choices is that though the word "rape" is used throughout in this book, Coetzee never describes a character as "black" or "white." No one ever says Lucy’s rapists were black, or that Petrus, the man she hires to help around her smallholding, is black; it’s clear from their style of talk that they’re of a lower class, country people – so we’re left to assume. In being explicit about sexual violence but not racial violence, is Coetzee trying to make a point about the difference between sex and race? If so, what? It’s one thing to use subtle strokes to depict the painful subtleties that characterize racial relations in post-Aparteid South Africa, but something else altogether to rely entirely on the racial assumptions the reader brings to the novel, which seems a nasty way to implicate the reader in that racism while letting the writer off scot-free.

The Dutch have been living in South Africa for 400 years – longer than the "British" have been living in America! David is South African born and bred – he’s no "Westerner"; but if it is common for white South Africans to consider themselves Western, the levels of subtlety in which Coetzee has mired this book’s racial preoccupations suddenly seem inappropriate given the depth and obviousness of the problem.

Disgrace is like a decent first draft. At just over 200 pages, its themes – morality, race, class, sexuality, sex, gender, parents and children, academia, Byron, animal rights, country life versus city life, modern South African identity, and violence – get a cursory treatment. And I can’t shake the feeling that it really wants to be called Desire; it keeps rushing back to the question of whether we have the right to judge desire, that most basic of human qualities, that which shows us who we are. It’s never felt so tedious to contemplate that old chestnut.

Lucy B., Books Correspondent

Lucy’s column, published every other Tuesday to Gather Essentials: Books, revisits recent widely celebrated works of literary fiction.

Lucy is a copy editor in Northern Virginia.

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