Book Review: Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999)

This Booker Prize-winning novel is really a good read, even if the story is rather depressing and the main character is anything but a likeable guy. That character, David Lurie, is a 52-year-old professor of literature reduced to teaching communications at a former university downgraded to a technical college in modern South Africa. Feeling the decline of his romantic and scholarly abilities, David (foolishly) pursues an "affair" with a 20-year-old student, Melanie Isaacs, which leads, eventually, to his firing. I think quite a few readers will be put-off by David's refusal, at his administrative/disciplinary hearing, to try to save his job and his career from the ax. It would be easy to read David's refusal "to confess" as stubbornness. But I think there's much more to it than that. David holds onto the idea that Melanie lit a fire in his soul; that their "relationship," as limited and one-sided as it was, was somehow a Romantic adventure. This is a sign of David's self-delusion (his ex-wife describes him later in the novel as a master of self-delusion). Instead, he has imposed himself on Melanie and basically pressured her to have sex with him. She is generally passive during their encounters; there is no sign that she is really interested in him, at all.

Once he "resigns," David goes to the rural East Cape to stay with his only child, Lucy, on her five hectares, where she grows flowers and keeps a kennel. David and Lucy do not get on very well. To David, Lucy is an overweight lesbian; when he looks at her, he sees an unattractive woman cut off from men, from the existence that he has known. Lucy clearly has reservations about David, too. The plot takes its most dramatic turn when David and Lucy are attacked by three African men; Lucy is violently gang-raped, and David is beaten and set afire. (The attackers also kill the dogs in the kennel.) After the attack, David has a hard time dealing with what has happened, but Lucy seems to be in even worse shape. She seems to either deny what has happened or to see it as the price of living where (and when) she does, as a white woman in contemporary South Africa. This outrages David, but there is little he can do to reach Lucy, who appears to let herself go, more and more. Eventually we learn that Lucy is pregnant and plans to keep the baby. This really outrages David.

To make things worse, Lucy's African neighbor and occasional helper, Petrus, seems to have been involved in some way in the attack, although he was, conveniently, out of town on the day that it happened. It turns out later that one of his nephews was one of the attackers, and the nephew now stays with him. Lucy takes this in stride, as it were, but David, well, is more confrontational.

I've read a few reviews of the book, but I want offer my own theory here. The book can be read as a lengthy reflection of what happens to a creative person once the ability to create has been lost. The answer is "disgrace." "Creativity" figures in many ways in the book: art (David's interest in and work on the Romantic poets, his "chamber orchestra" on the life of Byron, Lucy's folk art and flowers); relationships and love; and procreation. David Lurie was once creative--once a scholar, and a father. His disgrace is not simply his fall, but his lack of creative power; the inability to complete his Byron project, to connect to his daughter. His inability to even connect, sexually, with Melanie. The loss of creativity includes the loss of the ability to see things from the Romantic viewpoint/the inability to romanticize his world. Once David comes to live in the cold, hard light of reality, he is really dead.

There are a number of sex acts in the novel; the interesting thing is that the only "productive" or procreative act in the novel is violent. In the beginning of the book, David is frequenting a prostitute, Soraya, every Thursday afternoon--that is sex as commerce, sex as bodily function. Then, with Melanie, sex he initially understands as romantic, but which the disciplanry committee understands as manipulative and exploitative and which Melanie finds unpleasant, or so we are led to believe. Then, the gang rape, which produces offspring. (BTW, I think the book requires us to compare the outrage of the university authorities and womens' rights groups over the Melanie affair to the violence of a "real" rape; but Lucy's strange acceptance of the violent rape makes this comparison difficult.) Then, David has sex with Bev, a friend of Lucy's who runs a veterinary clinic (more on that in a minute), but that is so Bev can comfort him; he is reduced to "pity sex" with a dumpy, middle-aged woman. Then, in the end, a prostitute gives him oral sex in his car. The ultimate non-procreative sex act, sex as bodily function, again.

To put the matter pretty bluntly, David believes he is engaged in a romance with Soraya, but it is just a bodily function/a business proposition. He believes he has a romance with Melanie, but he is simply imposing himself and his self-deceptions on a pliable post-adolescent. He knows he isn't having a romance with Bev, but this leads him to conclude (p. 150) that he is "bankrupt." And then there's the streetwalker--the first sexual relationship David has in the book without any illusions of romance, on his part or the imagined-by-David part of the lover. It is the thing, stripped of romantic illusions, which he discusses early in the book in a lecture to his poetry class.

The disgrace, in a sense, is living without those Romantic illusions/self-deceptions. Living without art, without creativity. In that sense, David has been living a disgrace for a long time before the novel begins.

But I don't see his redemption in the book, either. (This is a pretty dark book.) Indeed, David's role in helping Bev "put down" the unwanted dogs in her clinic/kennel every week, and then taking the dead bodies to the town's incinerator, stands in as a symbol of the loss of David's creativity. Interestingly, Coetzee writes that the dogs' misfortune is their overpopulation; in the end, David becomes a disposer of the surplus of creativity; but there is no creativity in that act itself--the act with which the book ends.

But that last chapter is haunting. David puts down a crippled dog he has come to love. It will eventually become necessary, he thinks. But why then? I find this final act of the novel as the final death of David's creativity. To love even an animal has become impossible for him. He cannot view anything, even the crippled dog, with romantic illusion. In a sense, at the end of the book David is dead as a creative, romantic being, and one has little hope that he will ever get back what he knows that he lost long ago.