• 1 J.M. Coetzee was awarded other literary awards such as the Booker prize in 1983, the Prix Etranger (...)

1J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace was awarded the 1999 Booker Prize.1 The novel opens with an almost banal story of a fifty-two-year-old university professor from Cape Town, David Lurie, who after his divorce settles into a life of routine, devoting his time to his courses and to his weekly appointments with a prostitute. This ‘perfect’ schedule in a well ordered life is upset by an affair with one of his students, Melanie Isaacs. The ensuing scandal leads to his dismissal. David Lurie is transformed into a pariah and leaves for the Eastern Cape to visit his daughter Lucy whose farm has been burgled by people who raped her. In this novel, J.M. Coetzee seems to depart from the complex narrative structures of some of his previous works such as Dusklands or Life & Times of Michael K. Yet the limpidity, lyricism and simplicity of plot in Coetzee’s latest work are only a surface appearance.

• 2 Wolfgang Karrer, ‘Titles and Mottoes as Intertextual Devices’ in Intertextuality, Walter de Gruyter (...)
• 3 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Contemporary Poetics, Routledge (London, 1983), p. 124.

3The mention of the Romantic poets and of Don Juan at the beginning of the novel stresses the period when David Lurie lives in harmony with himself, having reached maturity and wisdom while at the same time having proved to himself that he is still sexually attractive to the young Melanie Isaacs. Madame Bovary is mentioned twice: first, when David tries to find out more about Soraya, his Indian mistress, who is married and becomes a prostitute in the afternoon, thus leading a double life like Madame Bovary; secondly, when he makes love to the middle-aged, parochial married woman Bev Shaw, who thus breaks the monotony of her dull provincial life in Salem. Her name, Bev, is connected to Bovary, a clearly deliberate choice. Zola’s J’Accuse is evoked when Melanie Isaacs decides to lodge an official complaint against David Lurie under the pressure of her boyfriend and relatives. At the University of Cape Town, Melanie Isaacs reads Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, an indication that the study of race issues witnesses to the open-mindedness in South African universities. The reference to the rehearsal of the play Sunset at the Globe Salon reflects the new political reality where ‘all the coarse old prejudices are brought into the light of day and washed away in gales of laughter’ (p. 23). A learned person, David Lurie thinks of Victor Hugo, ‘the poet of grandfatherhood’ (p. 218), when he starts accepting the idea of becoming the grandfather of a child conceived during his daughter’s rape by the black burglars. So the way these literary titles and names become part of the story implies a cultural and ideological ‘overcoding’ of the text, to use Wolfgang Karrer’s term.2 More than any other White South African Writer, J.M. Coetzee seems to need these ‘models of coherence’,3 to construct his text.

• 4 Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, Basic Books (New York, 1985).

4The symbolic impact of the overcoded characters’ experiences is powerful, especially in the post-apartheid context of the novel. David Lurie’s relationship with Melanie Isaacs, who could be his daughter, as well as his relationship with Lucy, his own daughter, embody his political preoccupations. In Beginnings: Intention and Method,4 Edward Said shows the importance of ‘beginnings’ in novels, arguing that they provide the key to an appropriate reading and decoding of the text. At the opening of Disgrace, the reference to the chorus of Oedipus operates as a ‘mise en abyme’ for the whole story. The omniscient narrator reports David Lurie’s thoughts: ‘He has not forgotten the last chorus of Oedipus: Call no man happy until he is dead’ (p. 2). David Lurie’s apparently harmonious life is going to be disrupted through his specific relations with the two ‘daughters’. The affair with Melanie becomes a paradigm for South Africa, a country sure of itself with its apartheid laws before 1991, but shaken after their abolition. Beyond David Lurie’s mid-life crisis, his relationship with Melanie becomes a strong allegory for the old and the new, the past and the present. There are signs which sustain this interpretation as when David thinks about changing Melanie’s name to ‘Melàni, the dark one’ (p. 18). At this point Melanie becomes a symbol for a difficult period of transition. In another episode, David in class explains the term ‘usurp’ quoted from Wordsworth’s The Prelude, which hints at their illegal/illicit affair. Wordsworth’s poem evokes the guilt which pervades the novel. David’s conscious reference to South Africa while discussing a poem set in the Alps stresses his wish to link the two geographical settings through European literature: ‘We don’t have the Alps in this country, but we have the Drakensberg, or on a smaller scale, Table Mountain, which we climb in the wake of the poets, hoping for one of those revelatory, Wordsworthian moments we have all heard about’ (p. 23). Another time, the first line of one of Byron’s poems which he discusses with his students suggests a secret wish for the emergence of a new world for the Whites: ‘He stood a stranger in this breathing world’ (p. 32). The whites must adopt a new attitude if they do not want ‘to be condemned to solitude’ (p. 34) like Byron facing Lucifer.

• 5 Gérard Lopez, Le Viol, PUF (Paris, 1993), pp. 18-19.

5Even though Melanie consents to making love with David Lurie, more out of duty towards the professor than out of true love, incestuous undertones mar their relation. One of their meetings appears as a rape scene as the narrator reports: ‘A huge mistake, he has no doubt, Melanie is trying to cleanse herself of it, of him; he sees her running a bath, stepping into the water, eyes closed like a sleepwalker’s’ (p. 25). Melanie, a symbol of South Africa, is raped by a political system which has kept the best for the white community. A committee entitled ‘Women Against Rape, WAR,’ (p. 43) accuses David of being part of a ‘long history of exploitation’ (p. 53), sending him leaflets saying ‘your days are over, Casanova.’ (p. 43). After Melanie’s revolt, David Lurie is seen by the Board of Administration of the university as ‘a worm in the apple’ (p. 37), a ‘viper’ (p. 23), a disgraced disciple of Wordsworth’ (p. 46). Melanie Klein shows how rape can physically injure the body and perturb the personality of the victim, who has to learn to free herself from the father figure, from the Oedipus complex.5 Melanie Isaacs goes through a similar process, moving away from David Lurie, abandoning her literary classes, developing fear and sadness, learning slowly to live with people of her own age, probably a process South Africa has to go through to move away from the apartheid system.

• 6 In South Africa, there is one burglary every minute, often with a rape to the extent that an advert (...)
• 7 See Gérard Lopez, Le Viol, Chapter Three.

6Ironically David Lurie, who is accused of ‘abuse’ (p. 53) and rape in Cape Town, witnesses in Eastern Cape the rape of his daughter, who has become a solid countrywoman, a ‘boervrou’ (p. 60), by three black men. This provokes a confrontation between David Lurie and the other South Africa, that of the farmers and the land. The white characters are faced with a history they have created. Coetzee’s story is certainly inspired by the harsh reality of South Africa today where rape has become one of the major forms of criminality.6 Yet Lucy’s reaction differs from what studies show in most cases of rape. Generally women are ashamed to speak about the assault because they feel guilty and fear being thought to have encouraged the rape, precisely because they are women.7 Here, only the burglary is reported to the police for insurance purposes. For complex reasons, Lucy does not want the police to know about the rape:

• 8 Dominic Head, J.M. Coetzee, CUP (London, 1997), p. 7.

8Lucy rejects her father’s advice to have an abortion. In African literature, pregnancy has often been a sign of hope for the future as we see in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat and in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Osiris Rising. Lucy declares: ‘I am determined to be a good mother. A good mother and a good person’ (p. 216). Despite the tragedy, Lucy shows that concessions and compromises have to be made because the different communities are bound to live together, a fact which David Lurie admits at the end of the novel when he sees his pregnant daughter farming, ‘looking suddenly the picture of health’ (p. 218), remembering that the baby she is bearing is of mixed parenthood or, as the future grandfather says, ‘a child of this earth’ (p. 216). Coetzee pleads here for biological hybridity in order to save the country, a ‘projected ‘rainbow country’,8 to use Dominic Head’s expression.

• 9 J.M. Coetzee, ‘South Africa Prize Winner’, in Newsweek, 8 November 1999, p. 72.

The experience is harsh for the whites, after so many years of supremacy. As Coetzee says in a recent interview, ‘at the deepest level, many still haven’t understood or accepted that life cannot go on as it did before.’9 Nevertheless the scene in which David Lurie and Petrus watch a football game which ‘ends scoreless’ (p. 75) symbolizes a new start in South Africa in which there is no winner and no loser.

• 10 In Scandinavia, Saint Lucy is celebrated as a festival of light on 13 December every year.
• 11 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, Routledge (London, 1991), p. 73.
• 12 J.M. Coetzee, ‘South Africa Prize Winner’, in Newsweek, 8 November 1999, p. 72.
• 13 Sophie Pons, Apartheid, l’aveu et le pardon, Bayard (Paris, 2000), p. 11. ‘Réconcilier un pays tout (...)
• 14 Dr Mike Marais, in ‘Self-fulfilling Racism’, Mail and Guardian, 28 April-4 May 2000, p. 27.

11In Disgrace, the absence of Black South African culture as such reveals a lapse at the symbolic level even if black characters such as Petrus and Pollux are central in the psyche of the white characters. Such an absence contradicts to a certain extent the obvious desire for a harmonious world expressed by the clear-headed Lucy whose name means ‘light’.10 Such an idea is also endorsed by David Lurie whose name refers to the biblical story of David and Goliath, David recognizing Goliath’s rights. David Lurie, Melanie Isaacs and Lucy represent three faces of white South Africa. They express contradictory views and show signs of disarray in the face of the new social and political order which remains complex and brutal despite the post-apartheid government’s desire to be more forward looking. Coetzee’s narrative strives to untie the knots of history. The apparently simple and linear plot which expresses the author’s desire for law and order is filled with his questionings, guilt, anxiety and bewilderment. Disgrace is postmodern since it ‘stresses the tensions that exist between the pastness and absence of the past and the presentness and presence of the present,’11 bearing in mind that the whites in South Africa are still in a state of shock’,12 as J.M. Coetzee comments. Through literature, Coetzee tries to reconstruct a new psyche in South Africa like Desmond Tutu who was given a mission in 1995 by Nelson Mandela ‘to reconcile the whole country, to alleviate the bitterness between the communities... to carry the dream of a unified Nation.’13 This novel should speak to South Africans about ‘their present, their past and their possible futures.’14