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Disgrace By J. M. Coetzee Making Heaven of Hell The protagonist of Disgrace is David Lurie, an aging professor in Cape Town who “lives within his income, within his temperament, within his emotional means. Is he happy? By most measurements, yes, he believes he is. However, he has not forgotten the last chorus of Oedipus: Call no man happy until he is dead.” He is someone who has convinced himself that he has come to terms with his life. Sex is a problem he has “solved” rather well, he tells us in the first line of the book, meaning of course that he hasn’t. His visits to Soraya, a coloured prostitute are a “moderate bliss, “a moderated bliss”. The problem is that the hint of darker things always lurks behind such facades of moderation. One day he runs into Soraya when she is with her sons. Presumably, she has a regular family life outside her profession and she does not want the two worlds to mix. She cools off towards him and catalyses the tumbling of his house of emotional cards, his carefully constructed notion of wellness. Bored and disconsolate, he pursues a young, Black student called Melanie, and eventually there is “not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core.” Melanie complains and he is indicted of sexual harassment. He refuses to repent publicly and chooses instead to leave the job. Unlike his contemporary Nadine Gordimer who adopts the mode of realism, Coetzee deals with South African history through allegory and fable. But Disgrace, written soon after the end of apartheid and Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, looks at concepts like judgement and fall in stark and startling ways. David’s defiance in the face of his fall is almost Luciferian and when he takes refuge at his daughter Lucy’s home in the countryside, his manner is not so much defeated as that of shrugging acceptance. He tries to settle into life here, helping at a dog kennel and taking an interest in his daughter’s life. Lucy lives quietly, growing farm vegetables and selling them at the local market. She shares land with Petrus, a black man, and he helps her around the place. David himself starts helping at an animal welfare clinic where Bev Shaw, who he finds “remarkably unattractive” tries to “lighten the load of Africa’s suffering beasts”. Things seem peaceful. Except that this may turn out to be hell after all. Three men come to Lucy’s home one day and ask to use the telephone. What happens next is shattering in its intensity as a personal as well as a political statement. The slow process of understanding and recovery—both only partial—that father and daughter must undertake forms the crux of the story. There are significant moments of tenderness and Coetzee threads multiple concerns together. David’s understanding of beauty, love and parenting will have to undergo severe changes before he can even hope to achieve any semblance of peace. And Coetzee is spare in his prose and unsparing in his honesty. The real challenge in the novel is the difference between David’s response to the attack and his daughter’s, and it is in this negotiating between the old ways and the new that much tension lies. The old South Africa is giving way to a new one, where structures and notions of power will be changed forever. Some things are bound to fall through the cracks. Lucy sees it as natural that her personal dignity should be one of those things. Her disgrace is both an echo of his and a counterpoint to it. (Remember that his charge was that of sexual harassment and his victim was also on the other side of the racial divide.) It’s a telling statement on racial and colonial subjugation. This is a difficult and extremely frightening book. Coetzee does nothing to make it easier or more reassuring. There are no missives of hope. David’s tenderness towards Bev and towards the dogs they put to death together is a sign of redemption on his part. But many of the other turns are disturbing enough to make you lie awake at night. The novel remains unyielding in its allegiance to truth. Things work out as they must--and if we can’t understand all the motivations, we’re not meant to. The ambiguity makes it more powerful and it’s allegorical reach makes it more than another chilling story. I could go on about many other things: the language which manages so much style without any pretension, the insidious imagery that builds up to a sense of menace, the fact that Lucy is one of the most fascinating characters written in modern literature. But really, a book like this can only be appreciated in its reading. It’s a masterpiece. To know more about Disgrace By J. M. Coetzee and read more reviews, simply logon to Justbooksclc, the best Online book library in Bangalore.
