Disgrace (1999)
J. M. Coetzee (1940)
220 pages
In the New York Times Book Review a few months back, two essays appeared in the Bookends section that considered the question of whether it is important for readers to like the characters in a novel. I don’t recall how the two writers came out on the question, but I remember thinking that, for me, although I don’t feel that I need to particularly like the characters of a story, or agree with their world view or their actions, it would be difficult to read a novel built around a main character who I fundamentally dislike. Then again, if one believes Carl Jung’s claim, it may be that such a book is the best one to read: “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
Which brings me to J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, and its main character David Lurie, who I admit I found extremely difficult to like. Lurie, in his early 50’s and divorced, is a professor of literature at a university in Cape Town, South Africa. Early in the story he meets one of his students, twenty year old Melanie, while walking across campus, and in short order prevails upon her to have sex with him. Events quickly spin out of his control, and soon the university has expelled him. Shunned by the university community and his neighbors, he leaves Cape Town and heads across South Africa to the home of his daughter, Lucy, who lives on a small plot of land in the countryside. There she boards dogs and raises produce for the local farmer’s market. The transition for Lurie from his urbane, university lifestyle could not be more dramatic.
From my summary so far, Lurie is simply a character exhibiting his humanity, flaws and all. But then we turn to his personality. He arrives at his daughter’s doorstep “disgraced,” as he puts it, and yet immediately begins to judge her lifestyle and life-choices, as he does with everyone he meets in the novel, even those from his past who he only thinks about. And he doesn’t keep his opinions to himself; insufferably smug and self-righteous, he criticizes most everyone he meets, whether the university committee members who bend over backwards trying to find a resolution short of expelling him, or his daughter and her friends and neighbors. And he appears to wear his disgrace as a badge of honor, proudly describing to his daughter how he did not give in to the investigating committee, did not allow any compromise that would impugn on what he found to be the romantic and poetic beauty of his love for Melanie, irrespective of her being his student. Most disturbingly, though he at times recognizes the effect his actions or words have on others, this self-recognition at most moves him to pity them, not to hold back his pointed comments. Lurie is a difficult character to stand, and as a reader I often wanted to reach into the pages, grab hold of his shoulders and give him a good shake.
Which Coetzee then does for us, as South Africa’s post-apartheid history rides hard into the lives of Lurie and his daughter. The moment arrives with little or no warning for them, or for the reader, and it changes completely the physical and psychological trajectory of the story. As Lurie attempts to come to grips with what has happened, he first turns angry, trying to manage the aftermath with the overarching self-assuredness that comes naturally to him. But the incident has shaken him deeply; where he had earlier confidently justified to himself his coercion of a student into bed, or his high-handed disdain for his university colleagues, he now finds himself unable to make things right again, or even shepherd them in a direction he finds appropriate. Suddenly isolated and at a loss how to move forward, he struggles to recreate himself as he contemplates his now shattered self-confidence and emasculated wit. Moving between his old home in Cape Town, and living near his daughter to support her, he passes through a kind of wilderness of the soul as he seeks a new basis for his life.
Disgrace begins as a character study of a man deeply set in his rather pedantic ways, before becoming, in hardly more than an instant, the story of someone forced to recognize and confront his advancing age and abrasive personality. In that same pivotal moment Coetzee shifts the place of the novel under the readers feet, from a nearly generic anywhere to a harsh and bracing commentary on modern South Africa and its apartheid past --- a past that can seem like a distant memory only a heartbeat before it comes exploding back into the present. And the disgrace that opens the novel, the one that Lurie can appear to wear as a badge of honor: that disgrace suddenly pales before real disgrace, violently imposed, whether individually or collectively, leaving a stain difficult to bear.
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I have also reviewed Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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