The author got both high praise — he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003 — and harsh criticism for not offering a way out of the darkness
For a man of his age, 52, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.” He hasn’t ‘solved’ anything, of course — as the 220-odd pages that follow the first line of South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee’s Booker-winning novel, Disgrace, unravel.
We get involved in the crisis of a White university professor, David Lurie, and what happens when sexual harassment charges are levelled against him by a student, “Twenty. Of age. Old enough to know her own mind.” But it’s the chilling peeks into his own mind that’s far more troubling: he knows, for instance, where “he ought to end it,” but doesn’t; he is “undesired to the core,” and yet watches her “die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck.”
In class — he teaches a course on the Romantics — he lectures about Wordsworth and Byron, spends time on Lucifer. The angel hurled out of heaven, who “chooses his own path… lives dangerously, even creating danger for himself…”; is afflicted by “madness… not of the head, but heart” and is “condemned to solitude.”
Imagination and reality
Lurie loses his job, the first inkling we are given that something is shifting. Disgrace was published in 1999, five years after the first democratic elections in South Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings were on, and the focus was on the transition from apartheid and how it was impacting everyday life, of both blacks and whites.
In the book, the professor moves to Eastern Cape to live with his daughter Lucy in her remote smallholding. “Aren’t you nervous by yourself?” he asks. “There are the dogs. Dogs still mean something.” She breeds watchdogs, Dobermans, German Shepherds, Rottweilers, making a living from the kennels. Her co-proprietor is Petrus, a black man who agrees “everything is dangerous today.”
One day three black men violently attack them at home, raping Lucy after shooting the dogs, spraying alcohol on Lurie and setting him on fire. “Dogs are made to snarl at the mere smell of a black man…” Lurie recalls, even as he tries to come to terms with the fact that Lucy won’t press charges against the intruders. In his most political novel yet, Coetzee makes his characters confront reality. What “stunned” her most, says Lucy, is that “it was done with such personal hatred… they see themselves as debt collectors… why should I be allowed to live here without paying?”
Her father offers these words: “It was history speaking through them… a history of wrong.” Coetzee got both high praise — he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003 — and harsh criticism for not offering a way out of the darkness. But, as Lurie said in class: “The question is not, How can we keep the imagination pure, protected from the onslaughts of reality? The question has to be, can we find a way for the two to coexist?” There are no easy answers.
