Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee, 1999
Penguin Publishing
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780140296402
Summary
Winner, 1999 Booker Award
Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee’s searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University.
Lurie believes he has created a comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs.
He considers himself happy. But when Lurie seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly disgraced.
Lurie pursues his relationship with the young Melanie—whom he describes as having hips "as slim as a twelve-year-old’s"—obsessively and narcissistically, ignoring, on one occasion, her wish not to have sex. When Melanie and her father lodge a complaint against him, Lurie is brought before an academic committee where he admits he is guilty of all the charges but refuses to express any repentance for his acts.
In the furor of the scandal, jeered at by students, threatened by Melanie’s boyfriend, ridiculed by his ex-wife, Lurie is forced to resign and flees Cape Town for his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the country. There he struggles to rekindle his relationship with Lucy and to understand the changing relations of blacks and whites in the new South Africa.
But when three black strangers appear at their house asking to make a phone call, a harrowing afternoon of violence follows which leaves both of them badly shaken and further estranged from one another. After a brief return to Cape Town, where Lurie discovers his home has also been vandalized, he decides to stay on with his daughter, who is pregnant with the child of one of her attackers.
Now thoroughly humiliated, Lurie devotes himself to volunteering at the animal clinic, where he helps put down diseased and unwanted dogs. It is here, Coetzee seems to suggest, that Lurie gains a redeeming sense of compassion absent from his life up to this point.
Written with the austere clarity that has made J. M. Coetzee the winner of two Booker Prizes, Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 9, 1940
• Where—Cape Town, South Africa
• Education—B.A. (English), B.A. (Math), University of Cape Town; Ph.D., University
of Texas, Austin
• Awards—Nobel Prize, 2003; Man Booker Prize—1983 and 1999
• Currently—lives in Adelaide, Australia
John Maxwell Coetzee is a South African-born novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He relocated to Australia in 2002 and lives in Adelaide where, in 2006, he became an Australian citizen.
In 2013, Richard Poplak of the Daily Maverick described Coetzee as "inarguably the most celebrated and decorated living English-language author." Even before receiving the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, Coetzee had been awarded the Man Booker Prize twice: in 1983 for Life & Times of Michael K and in 1999 for Disgrace. Other awards include the Jerusalem Prize, Central News Agency Prize (three times), France's Prix Femina Etranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize.
Early life and academia
Coetze was born in Cape Town, Cape Province, Union of South Africa to Afrikaner parents. His father, Zacharias Coetzee, was an occasional attorney and government employee, and his mother, Vera Coetzee (nee Wehmeyer), a schoolteacher. He is descended on his father's side from 17th-century Dutch immigrants to South Africa and on his mother's side from German and Polish immigrants. The family mainly spoke English at home, but John spoke Afrikaans with other relatives.
Coetzee spent most of his early life in Cape Town and in Worcester in Cape Province (modern-day Western Cape), as recounted in his fictionalised memoir, Boyhood (1997). The family moved to Worcester when he was eight, after his father had lost his government job. He studied mathematics and English at the University of Cape Town where he received two Bachelor of Arts degrees, both with honours: one in English in 1960 and the other in Mathematics in 1961.
In 1962 he relocated to the UK, working as a computer programmer for IBM in London, and ICT (International Computers and Tabulators) in Bracknell. He stayed until 1965. In 1963, while still in the UK, Coetzee was awarded a Master of Arts degree from the University of Cape Town for a thesis on the novels of Ford Madox Ford entitled "The Works of Ford Madox Ford with Particular Reference to the Novels" (1963). His experiences in England were later recounted in Youth (2002), his second volume of fictionalized memoirs.
In 1965 Coetzee won a Fulbright Scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin, in the US, where he received his doctorate in 1969. His PhD dissertation, "The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis" (1968), was on computer stylistic analysis of Beckett's works.
In 1968, he began teaching English literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo where he stayed until 1971. It was at Buffalo that he began his first novel, Dusklands.
Beginning in 1968, he sought permanent residence in the United States, a process that was ultimately unsuccessful due in part to his involvement in anti-Vietnam-War protests. He had been one of 45 faculty members who, in 1970, occupied the university's Hayes Hall and were subsequently arrested for criminal trespass—although charges against the 45 were dropped in 1971.
Coetzee eventually returned to South Africa to teach English literature at the University of Cape Town where, in 1983, he was promoted to Professor of General Literature. From 1999-2001, he was Distinguished Professor of Literature.
He retired in 2002, relocating to Adelaide, Australia, where he was made an honorary research fellow in the English Department of the University of Adelaide.
Man Booker Prize
Coetzee was the first writer to be awarded the Booker Prize twice: first for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and again for Disgrace in 1999. Two other authors have since managed this—Peter Carey (in 1988 and 2001) and Hilary Mantel (in 2009 and 2012).
Summertime, named on the 2009 longlist, was an early favorite to win an unprecedented third Booker Prize for Coetzee. It subsequently made the shortlist, but lost out to the eventual winner Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Coetzee was also longlisted in 2003 for Elizabeth Costello and in 2005 for Slow Man.[
Nobel Prize
Coetzee was the recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the fifth African writer to be so honored and the second South African after Nadine Gordimer. When awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy cited the moral nature of Coetzee's work and his "well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance."
Public image
Coetzee is known as reclusive, avoiding publicity to such an extent that he did not collect either of his two Booker Prizes in person. According to South African writer Rian Malan...
Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke, or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.
Asked in an email about Malan's comment, Coetzee wrote, "I have met Rian Malan only once in my life. He does not know me and is not qualified to talk about my character."
As a result of his reclusive nature, signed copies of Coetzee's fiction are highly sought after. Recognizing this, he was a key figure in the establishment of Oak Tree Press's First Chapter Series, limited edition signed works by literary greats to raise money for the child victims and orphans of the African HIV/AIDS crisis.
Personal life
He married Philippa Jubber in 1963 and divorced in 1980. The two have a daughter Gisela (1968) and a son Nicolas (1966) from their marriage. Nicolas died in 1989 at the age of 23 in an accident. Coetzee's younger brother, the journalist David Coetzee, died in 2010.
In 2006, Coetzee became an Australian citizen.
Anti-apartheid and racism
During the apartheid era, Coetzee called on the South African government to abandon its apartheid policy. Scholar Isidore Diala has stated that J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Andre Brink were "three of South Africa's most distinguished white writers, all with definite anti-apartheid commitment."
Jane Poyner, in a South African academic journal, argued that Coetzee's 1999 novel Disgrace allegorizes South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Asked about his views on the commission, Coetzee said:
In a state with no official religion, the TRC was somewhat anomalous: a court of a certain kind based to a large degree on Christian teaching and on a strand of Christian teaching accepted in their hearts by only a tiny proportion of the citizenry. Only the future will tell what the TRC managed to achieve.
Following his Australian citizenship ceremony, Coetzee said that...
I did not so much leave South Africa, a country with which I retain strong emotional ties, but come to Australia. I came because from the time of my first visit in 1991, I was attracted by the free and generous spirit of the people, by the beauty of the land itself and—when I first saw Adelaide—by the grace of the city that I now have the honour of calling my home."
When he initially moved to Australia, he had cited the South African government's lax attitude to crime in that country as a reason for the move. That statement led to a spat with Thabo Mbeki, who, speaking of Coetzee's novel Disgrace stated that "South Africa is not only a place of rape." In a 1999 investigation into racism in the media, the African National Congress pointed to Coetzee's novel Disgrace as exploiting racial stereotypes. However, when Coetzee won his Nobel Prize, Mbeki congratulated him "on behalf of the South African nation and indeed the continent of Africa."
Other political concerns
In 2005, Coetzee criticized contemporary anti-terrorism laws as resembling those employed by the apartheid regime in South Africa:
I used to think that the people who created [South Africa's] laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers ahead of their time.
The main character in Coetzee's 2007 Diary of a Bad Year shares similar concerns about the policies of John Howard and George W. Bush.
In recent years, Coetzee has become a vocal critic of animal cruelty, including the modern animal husbandry industry, and advocate for the animal rights movement. Coetzee's fiction has similarly engaged with the problems of animal cruelty and animal welfare, in particular his books Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth Costello and in the short story "The Old Woman and the Cats," which has as its protagonist Elizabeth Costello. He is vegetarian. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/4/2015.)
Novels
Dusklands (1974)
In the Heart of the Country (1977)
Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
Life & Times of Michael K (1983)
Foe (1986)
Age of Iron (1990)
The Master of Petersburg (1994)
Disgrace (1999)
Elizabeth Costello (2003)
Slow Man (2005)
Diary of a Bad Year (2007)
The Childhood of Jesus (2013)
Book Reviews
There is more in Disgrace than I can manage to describe here. But let me end by suggesting Coetzee's most impressive achievement, one that grows from the very bones of the novel's grammar. This novel stands as one of the few I know in which the writer's use of the present tense is in itself enough to shape the structure and form of the book as a whole. Even though it presents an almost unrelieved series of grim moments, Disgrace isn't claustrophobic or depressing, as some of Coetzee's earlier work has been. Its grammar allows for the sublime exhilaration of accident and surprise, and so the fate of its characters—and perhaps indeed of their country—seems not determined but improvised. Improvised in the way that our own lives are.... Disgrace surely deserves such recognition [his second Man Booker Prize]. But that may, in time, come to seem among the least of this extraordinary novel's distinctions.
Michael Gorra - New York Times Book Review
It may be that 200 pages have never worked so hard as they do in Coetzee's hands. He's a novelist of stunning precision and efficiency. Disgrace loses none of its fidelity to the social and political complexities of South Africa, even while it explores the troubling tensions between generations, sexes, and races. This is a novel of almost frightening perception from a writer of brutally clear prose.
Ron Charles - Christian Science Monitor
Written in deceptively spare prose that lets an eerie story unfold, Disgrace is a revelatory, must-read portrayal of racial fortunes reversed.
USA Today
J.M. Coetzee's new novel Disgrace, which last week won the South African writer his second Booker Prize is an absolute page-turner. It is also profound, rich and remarkable...is destined to be a classic.
New York Post
The most powerful novel this year.
Wall Street Journal
Disgrace is a relentlessly bleak novel.
Boston Sunday Globe
Disgrace is an act of literature...further proof that Mr. Coetzee stands with the very best writers in the world today.
Dallas Morning News
The richness of em>Disgrace lies in the elegant and allegorical role reversals, the spare symbolism of the language and in the characterization. We may not like David Lurie, but in Coetzee's skillful hands we can't dismiss him without pity.
Toronto Globe and Mail
Disgrace is a subtle, multilayered story, as much concerned with politics as it is with the itch of male flesh. Coetzee's prose is chaste and lyrical—it is a relief to encounter writing as quietly stylish as this.
Independent (UK)
The kind of territory J.M Coetzee has made his own.... By this late point in the century, the journey to a heart of narrative darkness has become a safe literary destination.... Disgrace goes beyond this to explore the furthest reaches of what it means to be human: it is at the frontier of world literature.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)
Disgrace is at the frontier of world literature
Sunday Telegraph (UK)
Compulsively readable.... A novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it aside once we've finished reading it.... Coetzee's sentences are coiled springs, and the energy they release would take other writers pages to summon.
New Yorker
Disgrace is a gripping tale told with spare pose, steely intelligence and a remarkable degree of tenderness.
Paula Chin - People
A slim novel with a bleak powerful story to tell.... Coetzee writes with a cool, calm lucidity that fends off despair, and his characters find a kind of peace in acceptance, if not hope.
Newsweek
[A] searing evocation of post-apartheid South Africa.... [N]ot a single note is false; every sentence is perfectly calibrated and essential.... The book somehow manages to speak of little but interiority and still insinuate peripheries of things it doesn't touch. Somber and crystalline.
Publishers Weekly
Disgrace is a superbly constructed work of pain and candor, and although it involves events that require the largest generosity, it has as its hero a man gripped by habits of petty selfishness.
Penelope Mesic - Book Magazine
Middle-aged professor David Lurie shuffles numbly through the shifting landscape of postapartheid South Africa.... Winner of the Booker Prize, Coetzee's eighth novel employs spare, compelling prose to explore subtly the stuttering steps one man takes in a new world.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. The novel begins by telling us that "For a man his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well." What can you infer about David Lurie’s character from this sentence? In what ways is it significant, particularly in relation to the events that follow, that he views sex as a "problem" and that his "solution" depends upon a prostitute?
2. Lurie describes sexual intercourse with the prostitute Soraya as being like the copulation of snakes, "lengthy, absorbed, but rather abstract, rather dry, even at its hottest." When he decides to seduce his student, Melanie, they are passing through the college gardens. After their affair has been discovered Melanie’s father says that he never thought he was sending his daughter into "a nest of vipers." Lurie has also written a book about Faust and Mephistopheles and explicates for his class a poem by Byron about the fallen angel, Lucifer, whom Lurie describes as being "condemned to solitude." What do you think Coetzee is trying to suggest through this confluence of details? How clearly does Lurie himself understand his behavior? How does his reading of the Byron poem prefigure his own fate?
3. When Lurie shows up unexpectedly at Melanie’s flat, "she is too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her." Later, he tells himself that it was "not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core." How do you view what happens in this scene? Is it rape?
4. How would you characterize Lurie’s attitude before the academic committee investigating the charges of harassment brought against him? Is the committee justified in asking for more than an admission of guilt? Why does Lurie refuse to assent to the fairly simple demands that would save his job? What consequences, practical and spiritual, follow from this refusal?
5. Lurie claims that in his relationship with Melanie, he was "a servant of Eros" and that his case rests on the rights of desire. On the God who makes even the small birds quiver." Is this an acceptable explanation of his actions? Do you think it is sincere?
6. What parallels do you see between the attack on Lurie and his daughter Lucy and Lurie’s own treatment of Melanie and Melanie’s father? To what extent do you think Coetzee wants us to see Lucy’s rape as a punishment for Lurie’s undesired sexual encounter with Melanie? Is this an instance of the sins of the father being visited upon the child?
7. In the course of the attack, Lurie is burned and blinded, temporarily, in one eye. What symbolic value might attach to these events? In what other ways has Lurie been blind? What significance does fire have for him?
8. Why does Lucy refuse to report her rape? How is her decision related to the changed relations between blacks and whites in post-apartheid South Africa? Why does she accept Petrus’ protection even after he has been implicated in the attack?
9. How do you feel about Lucy’s neighbor Petrus? To what extent do you think he was involved in the attack? What are his motives? What are the motives of the attackers? In what ways does Petrus embody the transition South Africa is making between apartheid and democracy? In what sense will Lucy’s child also represent that transition?
10. During a heated argument about whether animals have souls and how they should be treated, Lurie tells his daughter: "As for the animals, by all means let us be kind to them. But let us not lose perspective. We are of a different order of creation from the animals. Not higher necessarily, just different. So if we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we feel guilty or fear retribution." In what ways does this speech echo the logic of racial oppression and apartheid?
11. Throughout Disgrace, Lurie contemplates writing an opera based on Byron’s last years in Italy. Why is he so drawn to Byron? How does Byron’s situation in Italy resemble Lurie’s own? What ironies do you see in the fact that Lurie composes the music for his opera on a banjo and that he considers including a part for a dog?
12. From virtually the first page to the last, David Lurie suffers one devastating humiliation after another. He loses his job and his reputation. He is forced to flee Cape Town to live with his daughter on her smallholding in the country. There he is beaten and burned and trapped helplessly in the bathroom while his daughter is raped. Finally, he ends up ferrying dead dogs to the incinerator. Is there a meaning or purpose in his suffering? Is he in some way better off at the end of the novel than he was at the beginning? How has he changed?
13. Disgrace is narrated in the present tense, largely through David Lurie’s consciousness, though not in the first person. What effect does this method of narration have on how the story unfolds? How would the novel differ if told in the past tense? At what points do you sense a divergence between Lurie’s view of himself and the narrator’s view of him?
14. In what ways can the events dramatized in Disgrace be seen as a result of South Africa’s long history of racial oppression? What does the novel imply about the larger themes of retribution and forgiveness and reversals of fortune? About the relation between the powerful and the powerless?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)