Introduction
“One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to
anybody.” (Mother Teresa)
Disgrace
is the first novel by J.M. Coetzee to be set in post-Apartheid Africa. Ever
since this seemingly political and Booker prize winning South African novel was
published in 1999, it has stirred up a lot of controversy and drawn out a
response both emotional and political from many readers and critics throughout
the world. Many people have out rightly condemned this deceivingly small novel
as a racial text whereas some have also appreciated the author for drawing an
anxious, comfortless picture of the post-apartheid South Africa.
Coetzee
has very brilliantly incorporated many themes within this 220 pages long book,
but the most important one is how the people in South Africa are dealing with
change in the racial hierarchy now that the apartheid is over. Coetzee also explores the issue of sexuality,
violence and the inhumane treatment of animals at the hands of the human
beings.
Summary
Disgrace revolves around its
main „white‟ protagonist David Lurie, a divorced fifty-two year old Professor
of Communications at a university in Cape Town. Quite an interesting set of
contradictions, Lurie‟s own personal life is devoid of any kind of passion even
though he teaches romantic poetry. This professor of communications also
ironically isn‟t quite the best in communicating with the people that are the
closest to him especially his daughter. As an idolizer of the famous poet Lord Byron,
Lurie sees himself as an old-fashioned Casanova who he thinks has “solved the
problem of sex rather well” for his age.
Initially in the novel, David is dependent on a
prostitute named Soraya for the fulfillment of his sexual desires but this
arrangement comes to an end the moment he tries to pry into her private life.
Now left wanting and driven by his own egoistical image of a seducer, David
forces himself upon an undergraduate student of his, Melanie Isaacs, despite
knowing that for her it is
„undesirable
to the core‟ but this time he is not able to get away with it as he might have
been able in the past. This affair soon becomes the main reason for his
disgrace and ends his career as a professor when it becomes public and charges
of sexual harassment are filed against him. The main reason behind it being his
stubbornness to show repentance of any kind and he even term the experience as
“enriching” before the hearing committee.
After being ostracized from Cape Town in disgrace,
Lurie seeks refuge in his daughter Lucy‟s countryside haven in Salem. Here‟s in
comes the character of Petrus, a black neighbor of Lucy‟s, who introduces
himself as the „dog-man‟ to Lurie.
Petrus who used to work for Lucy early on is now steadily climbing up
the rungs of the social ladder since the apartheid has ended. Taking advantage
of the reversal in the social order, Petrus is no longer a „dog-man‟ but
instead owns a substantial amount of land. During his stay with his lesbian
daughter, she is attacked and raped by three black Africans at her home while
David is locked up in the bathroom, his head set on fire and the dogs in Lucy‟s
kennel are killed. Despite all this Lucy refuses to leave Salem and doesn‟t
report the rape to the police. She even goes ahead and decides to have the
child after she gets pregnant as an outcome of the attack. The tension between
father and daughter reaches an all-time high as David tries to confront her to
report the rape to the police. Meanwhile David also starts an affair with Bev
Shaw at the animal shelter as he now starts taking care of Lucy by working
there but the tension between him and Lucy finally forces him to go back to
Cape Town. On his way back, Lurie goes and apologizes to Melanie’s father Mr.
Isaac but also finds himself attracted to Melanie’s younger daughter Desiree.
He comes back to Salem after finding that his home at Cape Town has been
vandalized and a new replacement has been chosen for him at the university. The
novel ends with Lurie, now back in Salem, as he watches over his daughter while
she is working stooped over in the fields. He sees her as a peasant; he
understands that all the centuries of white rule and progress in the country
have come to naught.
Transition
and Racism
The
novel tries to show how the people are dealing with the shift in social order
in a postapartheid South Africa. The whites no longer hold any significant
power but the status of the blacks is rising day by day as evident in the
character of Petrus. He initially refers to himself as the “dog-man” and he
indeed used to be that once upon a time – A disenfranchised black man who did
nothing but work in Lucy’s garden and fed Lucy’s dogs. But now in the „new‟
South Africa he is the one who is in power – the one with majority of the lands
and influence over the area.
Despite
this transition from the old to the new, The black people in South Africa seem
not to have forgotten what they were victims of in the past as such remarks
keep popping up in the novel. Once such instance is when one of the commission
members claims Lurie‟s sexual harassment of Melanie to be racially motivated.
„We are again going round in
circles, Mr Chair. Yes, he says, he is guilty; but when we try to get
specificity, all of a sudden it is not abuse of a young woman he is confessing
to, just an impulse he could not resist, with no mention of the pain he has
caused, no mention of the long history of exploitation of which this is part.‟
Even
Lurie seems to think that Lucy‟s not reporting the rape to the police is due to
her “wish to humble” herself “before history”. He believes that she thinks she
has to compensate for the past atrocities on the blacks all by herself and they
are even allowed to take revenge from them. She just sees the rapists as
„debt-collectors‟. This is indeed a very bleak picture of the „new‟ South
Africa where although the apartheid has ended the oppressed has become the
oppressor. This is one of the main reasons that this novel has been claimed to
be racially skewed.
Despite
all such claims Coetzee just refers to race only once in his whole novel. This
happens in Petrus‟ party where Lurie notices that they are the only “whites” in
there. This I believe is very significant as it makes us the readers to make
our judgment for the whole mankind itself and not just the whites or the
blacks.
Violence
and Animals
Violence
especially sexual violence can be seen throughout the book. Disgrace holds out
little hope for the „new‟ South Africa as it first displays the rape (presumably)
of non-white woman (Melanie) by a white man (Lurie) and then later on the gang
rape of a white woman (Lucy) by the three black men one of whom is Petrus‟ kin.
This does highlight the fact that even though the apartheid may be over, the
racial problems still aren‟t. The scene when Lucy is raped is perhaps the most
violent in the whole novel.
“A blow catches [Lurie] on
the crown of the head… He is aware of being dragged across the kitchen floor…He
is in the lavatory, the lavatory of Lucy‟s house….The door opens; knocking him
off balance…„The keys,‟ says the man…The man raises the bottle…
[Lurie] speaks Italian, he
speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest
Africa…Mission work: what has it left behind…Nothing that he can see…Now the
tall man appears from around the front, carrying the rifle. With practiced ease
he brings a cartridge up into the breech, thrusts the muzzle into the dogs‟
cage…There is a heavy report; blood and brains splatter the cage.”
Animal
suffering at the hand of the men no matter what color they are has also been
shown in the book - May it be the goats that are slaughtered for Petrus‟s party
or the common dog. The most growth in Lurie‟s character takes place while
working at the animal shelter. At the shelter his job is to get rid of the
bodies of the dogs after they have been put to sleep and this is where he finds
his penance. Now “[h]e has learned…to concentrate all his attention on the
animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty calling by
its proper name: love.”
Conclusion
Disgrace is a novel about a person‟s humiliation, his
punishment and the human nature and finally the redemption that he seeks in a
country that has been riddled with problems of racism from a very long time.
The picture which Coetzee offers seems to be very bleak. As Lucy tells
Lurie near the end „Perhaps
that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing.
Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights,
no dignity … like a dog.‟ This indeed is quite disturbing. But I think the real
solution would be the one that Coetzee presents much earlier in this
brilliantly written novel when a white (Lurie) person and a non-white (Petrus)
person are working together in a drained storage dam in the fields. There they
are together shoveling out the shit as one even though they may not want to.
This picture isn‟t in the least hopeless. At the end Disgrace is indeed a
pitiless and straight to the point novel which I think quite efficiently
exposes the basic state of humanity at the end of twentieth century though most
of it might be applicable even today.
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