Book Review: JM Coetzee’s Disgrace

One would think that J.M. Coetzee’s critically-acclaimed novel, Disgrace , which garnered the author both a Booker Prize and a Nobel Prize In Literature would crescendo into a dynamic multicultural clinking of calabashes. But as fate would have it, in certain quarters the man’s otherwise extinguished work was considered so sacrilegious as to have a certain pipe-smoking former president famously scoffing; “South Africa is not only a place of rape.”

Granted, then-President Thabo Mbeki’s ire was a response to Coetzee’s assertions that government maintained a lackluster attitude on crime. But the reference to rape had patently been lifted from Disgrace .

Seen as a prophet of doom, clutching on to the nostalgia of the good/bad (depending on which side of the divide you’re perched on) ol’ days and the cynical tropes of what a new SA might mean, Coetzee was doomed to have a hard time explaining what some of the allegories, general cynicism and metaphors writ large on his lead character, David Lurie, really mean.

Is the fictitious David the alter ego of the real Coetzee? Indeed, is Coetzee not stretching it a yard by insinuating that a white person must first brutally pay for old scores if he is inclined to a future in this our beloved Mzansi?

Be that as it may, Coetzee’s sheer brilliance as a writer is less in that his book enticed the iconic John Malkovich to play the lead character in the cinematic interpretation than in the man’s undisputed finesse with prose.

Inevitably, for those who hold dear to the idea of free speech, to engage the text is to open oneself up to some (often ad hominem) assaults. Expect slurs like “sellout” as soon as you take the liberal position that the man has a constitutionally-enshrined right to self expression, provided of course he does not cross that sacred line between freedom of speech and crimen injuria. In this regard, as is his wont, Coetzee was always fated to find himself skating on thin ice.

The story of David; disgraced university lecturer, a cynic and sexist, struggling to reconcile the “values” of his upbringing with a post-apartheid (in his phrasing, “a post-religious age”) is potentially the hushed story of everyman raised of a certain generation. From early on in the text it is inarguable that he has resigned himself – prejudices and all – to who and what he is: “That is his temperament. His temperament is not going to change, he is too old for that.”

This is given creedence further on: “His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough.”

It could be said that his anxieties mirror those who are sometimes rankled by guilt, burdened by history and the colour of their skin and who still mope bitterly on the supposed betrayal of their erstwhile leaders delivering them into the maw of die swaartgevaar.

Author JM Coetzee. Source: Wikipedia

Pessimistic and wary, David views the country edging inexorably towards dystopia and agonises about where – if at all he has one – his place might be amidst the looming apocalypse. When he and his daughter, Lucy, are attacked by three black males he listlessly says to himself, “So it has come, the day of testing.” Curiously he asks and quickly answers during this home invasion; “Mission work: what has it left behind, that huge enterprise of upliftment? Nothing that he can see.”

The incident further affirms to himself that perhaps his general pessimism might not at all be missplaced. In fact it preys on his misgivings; he is spiritually worn-out, bleakly conceding that South Africa is no place for old men.

His pointed racial sentiments are echoed by a neighbour, Ettinger. “Not one of them you can trust,” says Ettinger before telling Lucy that he will send over a “boy” to fix her troublesome kombi.

The book is riddled with such blatant racial references and Coetzee disregards pulling the wool over the reader’s eyes opting instead to lay things out as truthfully as he probably knows they happen behind closed doors or around the braai. Rather than pretend such prejudices don’t exist, he puts his main character in the centre and does not turn a blind eye to the fact that the great Rainbow Nation ideal was perhaps too hasty and sanitised a remedy to the centuries of systematic subjugation and marginalisation.

Many a pundit across the colour bar have said as much but of course in more measured tones, certainly cautious as to not reveal their own secret prejudices in a society more obsessed with paragons of virtue than those who are courageous enough to call a spade a spade.

As a lecturer who “has no respect for the material he teaches” his prejudices are evident in the insignificance with which he views his students and essentially his very job in this transformed new society. So much so that when a complaint is lodged against him by a female student, he does not bother to meaningfully defend himself despite the university bending over backwards in an effort to spare him from dismissal and censure. When his daughter, Lucy, asks why he rejects their offer at “counselling,” his response beautifully encapsulates his disposition; “It reminds me too much of Mao’s China….self-criticism, public apology. I’m old-fashioned, I would prefer simply to be put against a wall and shot.”

However, the stark contradiction between his refined tastes and stubborn intellectualism which seem to further exacerbate his prejudices – and cause consternation with his daughter – and the fact that he somehow ends up having an unholy dalliance with one of his students is glaring. He notes that her accent is Kaaps (Coloured, no doubt), just as he is quick to notice that an escort worker (also black in the ‘inclusive sense’ [thanks Prof Attwell]) he consorts with “on Thursday afternoons” wrongly uses the word demand instead of command.

The dialogue of one of his African attackers is written in deliberately broken English.

An aside: nobody is pointing out to David or Coetzee that at his first visit to “market day,” it is “amasi” not “masa” that the African women are selling.

This is a familiar theme in Coetzee’s work, the disconnect in language whenever people of different races occupy mutual space in a country where there have been vast racial divisions spanning over many centuries. There are marked limitations to meaningful communication, sturdy social barriers that hinder any sincere cross-cultural intermingling.

Actor John Malkovich portraying David Lurie. Source:imdb

In one of his other Booker-winning books, Foe , this theme also carries through. Here an Englishwoman finds herself stranded on an island with a black slave whose tongue has been cut off. Needless to say her efforts at communicating prove to be mostly frustrating.

The disconcerting elements notwithstanding Coetzee is a master of laying out the story in all its crudeness and discomforts. He doesn’t try to sugarcoat anything instead puts himself up for the inevitable criticism that will no doubt be baying for his blood. He does not hide behind polemics and sentimental plotlines instead he is the honest, forthright voice of a country where such voices often find themselves cancelled, completely ignored or subject to name-calling. An obstinately didactic society that stuffs differing voices into vacuums and pretends they are not there at all.

Going into books like these calls for the same eyes one needs when reading, let’s say, the Bible. Riddled with prejudices against women, allusions to a cursed dark nation, one is forced to scratch below the surface. To read not purely from a literal, logical viewpoint but to dig for the deeper meanings, contexts and histories from which the text is derived.

Personally, I closed myself off to the racial offenses not because they weren’t irksome but only because I believed there was an honest sincerity in the spirit of the book that could not have been done justice any other way. To have not explored them in that crass manner would’ve been rank denial of the true SA reality.

A pointer from an online acquaintance suggested that I not conflate the real Coetzee with his character Lurie. They are not the same thing and only time will absolve or indict the author’s vast body of work. I wasn’t so sure. As stated earlier Coetzee has opined on the country’s crime situation. He has written cynically on the early days of the Nelson Mandela-headed democratic project. One must then wonder if Lurie’s intellectual cynicism about the state of education is not a reflection of how Coetzee, a highly decorated intellectual himself, feels in this new order. And if we are divorcing the character who just does not express much optimism within this new reality, how do we explain Coetzee up and leaving for Australia?

This is not to say we assume his decision to be racial. Not at all. It is common cause that the author unsuccessfully applied for American citizenship during the dark days of apartheid. The takeaway perhaps is just how deep the SA wounds go, how dehumanising the centuries’ old torment that many might see the country perched on a tinderbox that might go off anytime. And why await the implosion when you have the means to get out while you still can?

Perhaps – for want of better wording – that is the rankling leitmotif in Coetzee’s work: You love the country of your roots but sometimes things are just too confusing to think that you could remain faithful to it forever.

It conjures up images of a quote I once read in Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart from Bernodulus Niemand, the Afrikaner singer asking himself the agonising question, “how do I live in this strange place?” Maybe Coetzee ultimately found the answer to that dark question: Reconciling that he just couldn’t.

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