There is so much I want to say about this book. I first read Disgrace a few years ago and was struck by how much I was drawn in by Coetzee’s often-repugnant protagonist, David Lurie. Reading it again this week, I am again impressed by how Coetzee endears him to us, ensuring that we can’t stand back and point the finger—it isn’t and shouldn’t be that simple. But does Coetzee go too far the other way? Why should the story of Melanie Isaac’s rape be told through the eyes of her rapist? Why should the rape of Lucy Lurie be witnessed through the eyes of her father who wasn’t there? Are we not yet sick and tired of men controlling the narrative on rape? And what, if anything, is Coetzee shying away from? Lurie wonders at one point “Does he have it in him to be the woman?”
I’m not sure I have a sufficient answer to any of these questions, but I do think that the book is brilliant. There is something about the way it’s written that makes me think this man could be me. And that is quite a strange thing. I thought this the first time I read it, and I thought it again this week. I would have good reasons to be less than sympathetic to David Lurie’s perspective—I am twenty-six, I am a woman, I know enough about sexual assault—and yet the words of this predatory protagonist, written by a man, leave me wondering how many layers of difference there really are between us. There is something about Coetzee’s prose which crystallises human conflicts, boiling them down to something smaller and more technical, to something less like endless irreconcilable differences and more like a series of misunderstandings, more like failure of language to do its job and communicate truth. After reading Disgrace I am left with the frustrating feeling that whichever side we are on in a conflict, the differences between us may really just be differences in interpretation. What do you mean by the word “rape”? “Boy”? “Father”? “Woman”? Is it the same as what I mean? How important is it that we speak the same language? Maybe it’s the only thing that really makes a difference.
David Lurie is tormented by what he views as uncontrollable desires. To him, these feelings are romantic (big and little R), they are real experiences of life, his attraction to Melanie is not just a fantasy or an indulgence, it is a connection to something really human, something deeper and more profound than his daily life. To others, his urges (and his inability to stifle them) are weak, perverse, or morally repugnant. These are two sides of the same coin, two ways of looking at the same situation, and we see this repeatedly in the novel—once even as a literal coin (or medal) worn by a guest at Petrus’s party (“stamped on the one side with the head of sour Victoria, regina et imperatrix, on the other with gnus or ibises rampant”). This book is about conflicts (between young and old, black and white, men and women) and Coetzee actually constructs the narrative out of corresponding linguistic and semantic conflicts. The book is dotted with words that are up to no good—to cite just a few examples: the word play in Lurie’s remark about Bev Shaw, “If she is poor, he is bankrupt”; subtle references to other books, like Hardy’s Jude the Obscure “because we are too menny” (hinging on just the spelling of “menny”) and then a few pages later “He thinks of himself as obscure and growing obscurer.”; the frequent play on “burnt” “burned” and “burned up” that reaches its climax with Lurie literally set on fire; the tension surrounding the word “boy”; the inclusion of words in Afrikaans, highlighting gaps in English; the alternative spelling of Lurie’s name as “Lourie”, which at moments in the novel protects him from exposure. You could even interpret the decision to write this novel from a third person point of view as an example of this kind of linguistic mischief: letting Lurie off the hook by putting everything in the mouth of an unidentified third person, “That is where he ought to end it. But he does not.” It is a point of view from which Lurie’s culpability is constantly underplayed, he is passive and these events happen to him. How much difference a pronoun makes!
I began to think that the book is partly about the danger of duplicitous words, with sexual violence, post-Apartheid South Africa, and these characters’ lives as tied together by the overarching question about our inability to ever really know what we mean, think, or do. “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core.” This is what Lurie thinks immediately after he rapes Melanie. We wonder whether any of this would have happened if his definition of rape had been more accurate, more nuanced, if he had better understood. I was left thinking that there is too much in the word “rape” itself which is left up to interpretation, and that this is a disconcerting thought—to have to continually hope that other people will understand the meaning of such a complicated word.
Of course, Lurie does not know what he does not know. Later in the novel he is outraged at the idea that he doesn’t understand: “Do they think he does not know what rape is? Do they think he has not suffered with his daughter? What more could he have witnessed than what he is capable of imagining?” We know he doesn’t know what rape is, but people are often unable to understand things that they haven’t experienced. Lurie’s main weakness is his inability to recognise that the true meaning and experience of Lucy’s rape—of Melanie’s rape—is something that he may never be able to understand. Despite being a well-educated and thoughtful person, despite being a professor of “Communications”, he may never grasp what the word “rape” really means.
Lurie is not entirely blind. He is to some extent aware of the limitations of language. After an exchange with Petrus, in which Petrus uses the word “benefactor”, Lurie thinks, “A distasteful word, it seems to him, double-edged, souring the moment. Yet can Petrus be blamed? The language he draws on with such aplomb is, if he only knew it, tired, friable, eaten from the inside as if by termites. Only the monosyllables can be relied on, and not even all of them.” English here is portrayed as a malignant force, implicated in Apartheid and therefore broken in some way. Lurie can no longer count on the (arbitrary) link between English signifiers and what they signify. The words—and by extension the entire language—stands for a lot more than is immediately apparent. Conversation is like a dangerous game.
Lucy does a similar semantic or symbolic shift to her own body, giving it a role to play in the history of South Africa as a form of reparation. Her father spells it out for her: “history speaking through them […] It may have seemed personal, but it wasn’t. It came down from the ancestors”. Nothing is just one thing: words don’t work; bodies are symbols; rape is and is not rape. Each character in the novel exists as a walking example of this multiplicity. David Lurie is a respected professor, a loving father, and a rapist. Petrus is a landowner, the “dog-man”, a friend of Lucy’s, a potential husband, and an enemy. Bev Shaw is both an unattractive, simple country woman, a dedicated “escort” of doomed animals, a married woman, and David Lurie’s lover. It seems that depending on your perspective, anyone can be anything.
Lucy Lurie is seen by her father at various moments as unappealing, modern, independent, depressing, and impressive, all depending on his mood. But her vision for her life and her treatment of those around her is the most stable and the most admirable of all the characters in this book. The simple life that she has worked so hard to build from nothing is made so terribly complicated. The task ahead of her at the end of the novel is to love and care for her baby. But it isn’t just her baby. It is also the child of one of the three men who raped her. Her baby stands for all these things and it hasn’t even been born yet.
May 2020
t-barnes 