The novel is short and not designed to offer reading pleasure. The characters seem to act in ways that destroy their own chances of making a reasonable future in South Africa after apartheid, at a time of turmoil in the country. A number of issues are raised: racism, sexual harassment, rape, the future of a country, and animal rights (in recent times, a favourite theme of Coetzee).
No novel has excited as much discussion among the readers, during the session, and continuing afterward in the reading group’s WhatsApp. The passages selected for reading were short, but representative of the novel, covering all the themes and characters and major events. Some readers found the novel complex with honest depictions of various protagonists and the socio-political history of the times. Others found it dark, almost dystopian.
The question arose regarding the title – why is it called Disgrace? One reader answered it was because of the disgrace heaped on the two central characters, David Lurie, and his daughter, Lucy. For David Lurie, the main character, the author has plotted a path of abasement and degradation, one step at a time. The gloom of the novel arises from the failure of all the escape routes, held out and then withdrawn. KumKum added that the book contains disgraceful actions by several characters besides David Lurie – you could include the rapists and Petrus.
Another reader, Priya, said, the book presents a dystopian world , sad and abnormal. It is a difficult book, she said, with bizarre situations, desolate and dreary, loveless , joyless and frightening. It derives its strength from negativity, a space where no ray of hope exists and everything ends in hopelessness.
One of the pessimistic predictions of the novel (buttressed by the emigration of the author himself) is that S Africa is not a place where white people can live with fairness and justice.
Joe said in a well-written novel we come away with the impression that the characters are free spirits governed by their own fancies and predilections. And the choices they make may be capricious, not in accord necessarily with the active reader’s judgement, but we concede the character made them freely. In this novel we have the distinct impression of the authorial hand guiding every major mis-step of the characters. The locus of their decision-making is out of their hands. They are contorted into unnatural modes to satisfy the puppeteer, Coetzee. Removing their independence of action constituted the greatest flaw in this novel.
Brief Biography of J.M. Coetzee
John Maxwell Coetzee (pronounced kuut-SEE-uh) was born in 1940 in Cape Town, South Africa, of Afrikaner parents. He was educated at a Catholic school there. He graduated from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in Mathematics and English in 1961 and moved to London in 1962.
He worked with IBM as a programmer and later came back to do a Master’s degree in English from UCT in English in 1963. He moved back to UK and married and had two children. In 1965 he went on a Fulbright scholarship to University of Texas (Austin campus) and did a PhD in linguistics, and Germanic languages in 1969.
He taught for three years (1968-1971) at the University of Buffalo in upstate New York and began writing fiction. He was denied permanent residence in USA on account of an arrest during a campus protest. He returned to UCT and was a lecturer in English there from 1972-1982. He published his first novel, Dusklands, in 1974. Though surrounded by an intolerant racist regime, he could enjoy the fruits of free speech within the academic community at UCT. His second novel, In the Heart of the Country (1977), was briefly held up by censors, but it won the CNA prize in South Africa and was published in UK and USA. In 1980 he divorced his wife.
His third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) earned the CNA award again, and other awards abroad. It was his next novel Life & Times of Michael K (1983), that earned him international recognition of a high order after it won the Booker Prize.
He suffered a personal loss when his son Nicolas was killed in a car accident in 1989.
Coetzee’s literary endeavours flourished. He published several novels, Foe (1986), Age of Iron (1990), The Master of Petersburg (1994). Our novel for today, Disgrace (1999), is set in post-apartheid South Africa, and won him a remarkable second Booker Prize. A novel The Lives of Animals (1999) was later integrated into the novel Elizabeth Costello (2003).
Coetzee also published literary criticism collected in White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1987); Doubling the Point (1992), Giving Offense (1996), and Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986-1999 (2001).
Coetzee has receded from the limelight and become reclusive. and he did not appear in person to receive the Booker prizes. In 2003 J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; the citation read “who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider.” In September 2005 the South African government awarded Coetzee the Order of Mapungubwe (gold class).
Coetzee moved to Australia in 2002 and became a Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide in 2004. He got Australian citizenship in 2006. Coetzee is currently Professor of Literature in the English and Creative Writing Department at the school; his partner, Dorothy Driver, is Visiting Research Fellow there.
He has written three autobiographical memoirs: Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997), Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002), and Summertime (2009).
Attitude to South Africa
When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature he refused to credit UCT or South Africa. Therefore, one can read Disgrace as saying that there is or can be no place for whites in Africa.
Racism
Coetzee never felt comfortable with racism or apartheid in SA, but he was quite apolitical, unlike Nadine Gordimer, also a Nobel Prize winner, who took an active part in the struggle of the blacks and coloured people.
Reaction to the Novel Disgrace
The novel provoked anger for its rape scenes and earned the ire of the African National Congress (ANC). Coetzee emigrated to Australia in 2002, most probably because he could not put up with the new South African order.
Rape
Rape is the central determining point of the events in the novel. The first part ends when David Lurie resigns without accepting blame for taking sexual advantage of his student Melanie. The second part finds its denouement when Lucy accepts her rape as the given condition to continue living on the farm. She is forced to abase herself as the concubine of Petrus.
David Lurie’s end
Being downgraded from professor to disposer of dog carcasses does not seem much of a realisation of David Lurie’s life goals. But that is what the author has decreed for the professor, whose dreams of a Byron opera based on the poet’s infatuation for Teresa Guccioli does not go anywhere.
The Readings
Priya
The passage is where David Lurie is taking the class and Melanie's boyfriend butts in. The students are not very bright. David senses the class knows there is a current running between himself and the boyfriend of Melanie. In describing Lucifer as living among them but not being one of them, he is made out to be a monster; this parallels in a way how the author is depicting David Lurie himself. Everyone in the class knows that the person described in the passage as being ‘constitutionally wrong’ is the professor.
Thommo
‘Eros entered, I was no longer a fifty year old divorcé but a servant of Eros.’ The committee professors say there is a university rule that bans mixing power relations with sexual relations. One of the interrogating committee members pulls him up when she senses that David Lurie is not confessing to ‘the abuse of a young woman, just an impulse he could not resist.’ Admitting he was wrong is not enough for the committee. They want to look into his heart and know whether (a) he is contrite, and (b) his contrition is sincere.
Joe said that the interrogation does seem to be conducted on objective lines to inquire, take evidence from both parties, and ascertain whether an existing proscription against faculty-student sexual relations has been violated, and if so how seriously. Instead, like God, they are trying to look into Lurie's heart and assess whether the sorrow for his sins is sincere and meritorious, or fake and therefore condemnable. Saras wondered if the committee wanted to speak to a lawyer representing him rather than have to deal directly with Lurie. Thommo said the committee members seem to be at sea as to the procedure.
Doesn't Lurie come across as arrogant, asked Saras? Yes, he was, said KumKum but she noted that Melanie was a willing partner. Exactly, said Geetha. She opened the door and allowed him to come in and when she went to his apartment she was not an innocent thing. Saras interjected that since Lurie was the faculty member with superior power, he was the one who should have been conscious of the game he was playing. KumKum agreed he was the exploiter. Geetha said Lurie is what he is and does not even try to defend himself. The committee members are however willing to let him keep his job (and his retirement fund) if they are satisfied he has struck his breast with proper contrition and asked forgiveness. But he is too proud for that.
Thommo said Lurie earlier had a paid relationship with a woman who gave him sex for hire. It was when that arrangement broke down he was tempted into these ways, and his academic standing came into conflict with his sexual relations – as it did not when he was having off-campus paid sex with a prostitute. Lurie may not have had a history of exploiting students before this, though one can't be sure.
Saras expressed a damning notion. In most books the hero or protagonist has some redeeming qualities even if flawed.
But Lurie was a guy just she did not like. Thommo talked about a film he saw recently called The Wife. There is a Nobel prize winning author, Joseph, (played by Jonathan Pryce) whose wife has been writing all the books published under his name. He met his wife when he was married to another person and had a child, and the new woman, a student of his, came to baby-sit the child. Then he started an affair with the baby-sitter who became his new wife, Joan Archer (played by Glenn Close). He was sacked from the college. But he continued having adulterous relations with other women during his life, and even at the award ceremony Joan accuses him.
Arundhaty reminded the readers that, as KumKum said, Melanie was not coerced into the affair – she was a willing participant to some extent. Saras said it was a subtle pressure, and the second or third time, even when she demurs he goes ahead and takes her. It's all about him, said Zakia. Yes, he's Lucifer, said Saras. Pamela added that Lurie was a fast worker – he didn't take much time with Melanie or Bev Shaw!
He's a smooth operator, everyone agreed.
Geeta
She read the passage about the dogs and the Animal Lovers' Society. Geeta said she chose the passage because it had a lot of basic truths, e.g. as Lucy tells her father:
They are not going to lead me to a higher life, and the reason is, there is no higher life. This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals. That's the example that people like Bev try to set. That's the example I try to follow. To share some of our human privilege with the beasts.
Geetha
It's a conversation between David Lurie and Bill Shaw after the rape of Lucy has happened. Bill calls it a shocking business, which is driven home when it happens to someone you know. “It's like being in a war all over again.” Geetha loved the concluding phrase for its personification of ‘day’:
War, atrocity: every word with which one tries to wrap up this day, the day swallows down its black throat.
Pamela
Pamela chose this passage because for the first time in the novel something good was revealed about David Lurie. Up until this point he was leading a frivolous, flippant, lousy life, said Pamela, like a butterfly going from one flower to another without any qualms.
But now that his own daughter has been raped he is full of concern, but helpless; at last the humanity comes out. The passage ends in this touching way:
She is lying with her face turned to the wall. He sits down beside her, touches her cheek. It is wet with tears.
KumKum sensed that Lucy had not received steady parental love, or closeness while growing up. Thommo noted the reference to Amazonian women in the passage:
Not for the first time, he wonders whether women would not be happier living in communities of women, accepting visits from men only when they choose.
This was exactly the way it was in old times with the Nair community. The women lit up with smiles on hearing this ––
Shoba
The passage is about the rape of Lucy and the conversation David Lurie has with Petrus afterward. He is trying to get Petrus to say the word ‘violation’ which runs like a thread through the whole novel. We see Lurie mostly as a womaniser and are given no entry into his everyday activities – speaking to a friend, having a cup of coffee, etc. He is painted entirely in dark tones. Thus we can have no empathy for him – it is perhaps done on purpose by the author, said Shoba. But a glimpse of his concern for his daughter is apparent in this passage and that humanises him for the reader.
Devika
In this passage Devika said Lurie is thinking about himself: what is he doing on this farm? He is extremely self-centred; he thinks he should move on with his life. KumKum said his daughter, Lucy, is not letting him in. Devika agreed when KumKum said it is not a relationship that has developed over time, and deepened with mutual understanding.
While he attends on his injured daughter, he muses about his Byron project yet to take shape, about writing chamber music for the story of Lord Byron and his last flame, Countess Teresa Guccioli.
Zakia
David Lurie is concerned about his daughter and wants to get her to move out. He is approaching Petrus for help in this incident but gets nowhere. Petrus had gone missing at the time the three boys came to rape and steal, and a relative of Petrus was involved, but Petrus says there is nothing to fear.
Later he shares his fear with Bev Shaw and confesses:
Parents and children aren't made to live together. Undernormal circumstances I would have moved out by now, gone back to Cape Town. But I can't leave Lucy alone on the farm. She isn't safe. I am trying to persuade her to hand over the operation to Petrus and take a break. But she won't listen to me.
David Lurie is convinced that Petrus is waiting for Lucy to pull out in order to take over her property. But he can't change Lucy's mind. And Lurie has no great hope that Petrus will be her saviour, even though Lucy thinks that she has ‘paid her due’ and will be left alone now.
KumKum thought that as part of the divorce deal the daughter went to stay with Evelina, the first wife, in Holland. But she could not get on with her stepfather when Evelina remarried and returned to stay with her father in South Africa. Lucy was a lonely child; recall she turned out lesbian. After coming back to her father, she didn't ever want to visit her mother in Holland.
Joe
The matter of Lucy has been discussed with Petrus, and Bev Shaw in the passages we read; now it's time to discuss it with Lucy. She argues with her father:
What if . . . what if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying?
David Lurie is categorical: ‘They want you for their slave.’
Lucy replies: ‘Not slavery. Subjection. Subjugation.’
One cannot but imagine that this is a considered judgment the author is passing on the conditions in South Africa that will dog the white Afrikaners in future, where the position of their women will be similar to what it was for black women in apartheid times.
In this conversation it looks like Lucy has mentally adjusted herself to the worst. She has become apathetic. She will not leave the farm and go away because in her mind it is some kind of surrender. But on the other hand subjugation and slavery to the people who have raped her, does not strike her as surrender. She is in a torn state of mind, said Joe. In such a case when there is no closeness between the father and the daughter, it is difficult for her to accept what the father says: namely, that what she is reconciling to is not a good deal – it's a bad deal, just let it go and get out of here. There it is: prepare to live with what the novel calls ‘Disgrace.’
It's a painful relationship, said KumKum, and it taught him something – think of the nonchalance with which he sexually attacked Melanie. Now he witnesses the agony of the female side in his daughter. Perhaps he won't himself rape anybody after this. Joe disagreed but Geetha stepped in to express her view. She does not believe David Lurie is a rapist. In Western countries these kind of relationships are not uncommon. He is a normal city-bred guy, said Geetha. The smiles on the faces of the readers indicated they tended to agree with Geetha, rather than the more severe view of David Lurie taken by KumKum.
KumKum
A strange thing happens when David goes to Melanie's place when returning to the farm; he takes a detour to visit the parents of Melanie, the student from whom he had taken sexual pleasure. This visit was arrogance on his part, said Saras; no, daring, said KumKum. Let's see what takes place. It's central to the whole book according to Saras.
Mr Isaacs (Melanie's father) comments:
... we are all sorry when we are found out. Then we are very sorry. The question is not, are we sorry? The question is, what lesson have we learned? The question is, what are we going to do now that we are sorry?
KumKum thought David Lurie was showing a measure of regret for his rape (KumKum persists in thinking of what Lurie did to Melanie as ‘rape’). Mr Isaacs thinks in his God-fearing way that it was God that brought Lurie to his home.
Joe noted that Lurie does in Isaacs’ home what he refused to express before the committee, namely true contrition, by bowing his head to the ground in front of Mrs Isaacs and her younger daughter. Though that gesture can not improve his condition of Disgrace. Even in this pose of apology Lurie feels attraction for the younger daughter as Geetha pointed out, laughing. His male libido is ever active and the women could not help smiling at the rascal!
Arundhaty
David Lurie is a bundle of contradictions, said Arundhaty, and oscillates between pity for his raped daughter and helplessness, while never abandoning his predatory behaviour with women.
In this passage he appears at the house of Melanie and makes the acquaintance of Desiree, the younger sister of Melanie, the desired one as her name translates. Immediately his mind wanders to what it would be like to have both sisters in bed with him ... Saras said Lurie gives the reader no reason to show him an iota of sympathy. KumKum said she would not even consider a cup tea with him.
When Lurie goes away telling Desiree that he will catch up with her father in school, it is almost as if he cannot trust himself to remain alone with the young girl. But KumKum offered the excuse that he had no interest in Desiree, and was in love with Melanie. The other readers disputed his love for Melanie; he may have been physically attracted to her, said Saras, but in no other sense did he have any feelings for her, certainly not love. It was all sinister. But Geetha saw that he was willing let her rest on his divan at his house when she was exhausted. Was that simply luring her? No, thought Geetha.
Saras
In her passage Lurie meets his ex-wife, Rosalind, who's sensible and she tells him off, questioning his wayward actions. She has her private source of inside information and knows what went on at Lurie's meeting with the faculty committee.
After the reading in which Rosalind gives him dose of straight talk, KumKum said this was the best woman in his life; the murmuration of laughter all round gave voice to the readers’ wide assent. Saras said if Lurie had stayed with Rosalind he would not have got into all this trouble. Rosalind knows from her ten years of married life that Lurie is a deceiver and a self-deceiver.
When Lurie insists he was fighting for a principle, the principle of free speech and the right to be silent, Rosalind asks sarcastically:
Are you sure it wasn't just a case of being caught with your pants down?'
Rosalind has seen the new love (‘inamorata’) of Lurie at the theatre and continues to rib him:
I can see why you fell for her. Big, dark eyes. Cunning little weasel body. Just your type. You must have thought it would be another of your quick flings, your peccadilloes. And now look at you. You have thrown away your life, and for what?'
She is on a tirade but still has feelings for Lurie, and feels if not sympathy, then at least pity, and expresses the hope he won't end up like ‘one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.’
She is very blunt, said Kavita. Yet, said, KumKum, she offers to cook him a real meal when he is tired of jam and bread. Saras thought the straight talk quite funny when Rosalind said, ‘You shared my bed for ten years, why should you have secrets from me?’ She is still concerned for him but can't understand what he is doing with himself. She knows his worth and tells him: ‘people who aren't good enough to tie your shoelaces make jokes about you.’
I hope he goes back to her, said KumKum, at which the thought of a sequel occurred. Joe said there is only so much truth-telling in this vein a man can take, and that may have been the precise cause of their falling-out. Instead of gentle admonition she may have been constantly ruffling his feathers and taking him down like a harridan, though in this encounter she seems to have a sense of humour too, every bit his match, and a better person to boot.
Kavita
She admitted that as the last person to select a passage, she found the good passages were taken. The lesson of the passage she chose finally is that if you are a single woman and pregnant you need a male for protection in the world. Saras said the book is also referring to the social changes that are taking place in South Africa as the blacks gain power. Rape and pillage was something the whites used to do, said Saras; it's a disturbing book in her opinion.
When Lucy says at the end of the passage that she is willing to sign over her land to Petrus, and become his concubine, so long as she can live in her own house, it struck all the readers as a bad bargain. It is the most pathetic condition that could befall woman, said Arundhaty. It beats Zakia why Lucy does not take up her father's offer and go to Holland, or anywhere else, with the money he will get from selling his house. She re-make her life, according to her own independent principles. She likes to be near her father, suggested Arundhaty jokingly. It is also a fact that women feel subjugated and cannot climb out of certain situations themselves, even if, as in this case, a father is prepared to assist materially.
Joe said what he found strange is that Lucy in coming to her decision is prepared to contradict her entire ethos of life and the principles by which she has lived, namely: 1) she will be independent, 2) she is a lesbian and wants to live her sexuality according to her lights, and 3) she will live without being dependent on anyone. If there was any reason she moved away from her parents very early in life, it was because she realised she could not be the person whom her parents wanted her to be. She is completely compromising her future life – to gain what in return, is difficult to understand.
It is, said Joe, a deliberate condemnation by the author Coetzee of this bright independent character so that she may suffer the same Disgrace he has heaped on David Lurie, and on Melanie. She too must suffer and compromise her principles, even when reasonable alternatives are present – all to make good on the author's notion of universal Disgrace in South Africa. It is a condemnation through the fate of Lucy, of the entire post-apartheid structure. Coetzee does not tire of causing his characters to fail in life, one after another.
Saras mentioned the notion that had been floated earlier by Lucy: ‘They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying?’ It's very dark.
Pamela put forward the thought that Teresa Guccioli about whom Lurie was attempting to write an opera, was some sort of ideal woman in Lurie's mind. The others laughed and pointed out it would only add to the dangerous liaisons in which Lurie had been involved and complicate matters still further.
When Saras mirthfully raised Lurie's floor copulation with Bev Shaw, Geetha sought an explanation for it as sympathy being offered for her, and perhaps Bev Shaw needing the closeness even more, like a security blanket for her. But Saras said Lurie's moral compass is all over the place and she could not help a guffaw:
When Coetzee left South Africa for exile, and again when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and pointedly snubbed UCT and South Africa in his original statement on getting the news while in Chicago, by proclaiming the University of Chicago as his intellectual home, he surely strengthened a reading of Disgrace as saying that there is or can be no place for whites in Africa. That, certainly, was (and to some extent remains) the dismayed response of many young white South Africans, who saw (and see) Coetzee's decision as a repudiation of the new South Africa and a grim comment on their own prospects if they stay.
KumKum said she and Joe sat down to have an argument about this novel. ‘Don't listen to him,’ she exclaimed. Saras put forward the thesis that it was one of the great things about KRG that we read novels that are not within our personal range of choice necessarily, and this exposes us to what lies beyond. Shoba said otherwise our reading remains limited to what appeals to our natural taste. Saras gave the example of Midnight's Children, the novel by Salman Rushdie she had started five times and given up, before making it through.
Gopa appeared briefly and vanished. She told us next day she had run out of allotted GB of download for the 24-hour period from her mobile phone carrier.
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