Dark but a great read. ( )

Reviewed by Mr. Overeem (Language Arts)
For two years, my esteemed comrade Mr. Boland has implored me to read DISGRACE. This weekend, I did. It is truly among the best novels I have ever read. Coetzee is a white South African emigrated to Australia, and, among other things, this novel is about life in post-apartheid South Africa. But that's just scratching the surface: it's also about culture clash, gender, aging, animals, parenthood, sexuality, ethics, mortality, morality, and much more. And, despite its complexity, it's intensely readable; I consumed its 220 pages in about three hours. However, it's not the place to go for easy answers about human nature--which is why Mr. Boland's students will be lucky if they get to read it as a class. The 1999 Booker Prize Winner. ( )

David Lurie is a 50-something university professor, twice divorced. He's not particularly skilled at relationships. Perhaps he doesn't even understand what a relationship truly is, since early on he assumes that weekly encounters with a prostitute constitute some kind of more permanent bond. When the prostitute leaves town, David finds himself without female companionship and makes the even more egregious error of striking up an affair with a student. Of course this is discovered, and David leaves the university in disgrace. He visits his adult daughter Lucy, who runs a small farm and dog kennel in a rough and sometimes dangerous part of rural South Africa. At first it seems David will ease into the slower pace of country life, come to terms with the wrong he has done to others, and potentially make peace. But Coetzee has other plans, and visits upon David and Lucy an horrific act of violence resulting in even more disgrace, this time affecting both of them. Their emotional recovery -- individually and collectively -- is at the center of this novel.

David is not a particularly likable character. He is so interpersonally inept that he nearly always makes the wrong choice. I didn't really care whether he recovered from his ordeal; in many cases he got what he deserved. Lucy, on the other hand, was a more sympathetic figure. A lesbian abandoned by her partner just before David's arrival, she is fiercely independent. She is committed to making her farm successful, despite the danger of being a woman alone in that part of the country. She resists David's attempt to protect her (a natural response for a father, but still unwelcome). And yet despite her independence and strong will, when faced with a situation requiring legal action, she prefers to give in and try to make peace herself. She succeeds to some degree, but with tremendous personal sacrifice.

Disgrace raised up many ethical and moral issues, prompting me to consider how I might handle similar situations. Interesting reading. ( )

Unsettling book, has unsympathic characters, but I was interested in the daughter being away/independant situation with my own daughter recently going away to live in the country and start a new life. Worth and easy to read but not a great book. ( )

HEAR NO EVIL, SEE NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL

Rather than literary allusions, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace is filled with overt literary references. It is as if the decline in culture that the narrator, David Lurie, sees in such circumstances as the change in his duties from teaching “Literature” to teaching “Communications” is reflected in his own life. He no longer relies on shared culture to give meaning to literary works in the classes he teaches, or even to the narration of his own story. Instead, he overtly explicates the literary texts for his students, as well as for the reader. However, David often misconstrues the import of his own narration, as well as his own actions. Essentially, David does not understand the concept of evil, and therefore does not recognize it in either the outside world, nor in himself. Because he is unable to recognize it, he is defeated by it. The trajectory of David’s story is foreshadowed by the list of his published works:

…the first on opera (Boito and the Faust Legend: The Genesis of Mefistofele), the second on vision as eros (The Vision of Richard of St Victor), and the third on Wordsworth and history (Wordsworth and the Burden of the Past).

Disgrace, p.4 . Despite writing an opera about Mefistofele, he does not hear the evil of his own soul, but like Faust is willing to sell his soul to the devil in order to satisfy his worldly desires. His next work shows that he believes there is something sacred about his own animal desires. He calls his desires “eros” (“I became a servant of Eros.” Disgrace, p.52), and thus cannot see that they are mere lust, as signaled to the reader by the name of the beer—Meerlust-- he serves to Melanie in his apartment. Disgrace, p.12. His last completed work, on Wordsworth, shows that he cannot bring himself to speak evil about himself; he sees the pain around him not as caused by his own acts or omissions, but simply as a “burden of history.” This image of the three monkeys is reinforced in the note from his daughter Lucy:

I think of you as one of the three chimpanzees, the one with his paws over his eyes.

Disgrace, p. 161. In his description of his affair with Melanie Isaacs, we see that he has not so much seduced her as he has overwhelmed her. He notes that she does not seem a willing sex partner, but he presses her anyway. Although he does not technically rape her, he is in fact guilty of precisely the behavior that is rightfully condemned by the university; he has used his position of power as a professor to exploit a student. While he admits his guilt in that he has violated a policy, he feels it a point of pride that he will not feel guilty about his actions. He is so proud of his refusal to let the university community dictate what he will think (even at the price of losing his job and pension), that he fails to understand that he did in fact do an evil thing to Melanie.
David is so ignorant of evil, that he believes Satan can be recognized by the clothes he wears and his mode of transportation. He thinks Melanie’s boyfriend is Satan, describing him:

He is tall and wiry; he has a thin goatee and an ear-ring; he wears a black leather jacket and black leather trousers;…he looks like trouble….Light dances on his black eyeballs.

Disgrace, p.30. In the class session where the boyfriend accompanies Melanie, David quotes from one of Lord Byron’s poems:

He stood a stranger in this breathing world,
An erring spirit from another hurled;
A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped
By choice the perils he by chance escaped.
***
He could
At times, resign his own good for others’ good,
But not in pity, not because he ought,
But in some strange perversity of thought,
That swayed him onward with a secret pride
To do what few or none would do beside;
And this same impulse would in tempting time
Mislead his spirit equally to crime.

Disgrace, p. 32, 33. The allusion in this poem is to Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost. David asks the class what kind of creature is described in the poem. David makes it seem like the boyfriend is recognizing his own nature when he answers that the creature who “does what he feels like. He doesn’t care if it’s good or bad. He just does it.” Disgrace, p.33. However, it is more likely that the boyfriend recognizes David in those lines. After all, it is David who does whatever he wants to, despite the rules, and despite Melanie’s manifest unhappiness. Indeed, most of what we learn about the boyfriend is mere conjecture by David. It is unlikely that the young man is Melanie’s “boyfriend.” Most likely he is just a concerned friend. There is no objective indication that he is her boyfriend—nowhere is it shown that they hold hands, or kiss, or are anything more than friends. It is David’s own unreliable mind that makes up the back story of an intimate relationship between Melanie and the “boyfriend.” Similarly, David assumes the “boyfriend” vandalized his car and sent the note accusing David of being a Casanova; however, there is no objective proof of that. Many people could have known of the affair and done those things. Even if the boyfriend did do those things, he can be seen as an admirable figure who is trying to protect Melanie from her overbearing professor. We see this most poignantly when the young man throws spitballs at David when David is in the audience of the play, again trying again to intrude in Melanie’s life. David is wrong when he thinks Byron’s description of Satan fits the putative boyfriend. More importantly, David fails to see that the words describe himself. When David agrees to help Bev in the animal clinic, he finds it important that his daughter know that he is not doing so out of the goodness of his heart, but just because he wants to. His words echo the import of the poem:

‘All right, I’ll do it. But only as long as I don’t have to become a better person. I am not prepared to be reformed. I want to go on being myself. I’ll do it on that basis.’ His hand still rests on her foot; now he grasps her ankle tight. ’Understood?’

Disgrace, p.77. His daughter understands him perfectly, and answers him by quoting the phrase that society once used to describe Byron: “’So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Id.
David sees himself as a Byronic figure, although he concedes he is an aging one. David has a grandiose plan to create a chamber opera about Byron and his mistress Teresa Guiccioli that will be “a meditation on love between the sexes.” Disgrace, p.4. He sees himself like Byron, as a romantic, dashing, desirable man to whom the usual strictures and mores of society do not apply. Women are to be used and discarded, and should just feel grateful they were used by the great Byron/Lurie. Thus, he tells Bev he has left Cape Town in “disgrace,” but says it only in irony. Disgrace, p. 85. The way he describes the Hearing at the University, it is clear he thinks it is motivated by political correctness run amok. Even if he is right about that characterization, it does not alter that his behavior towards Melanie was disgraceful.
What happens to his daughter, Lucy, is more violent and shocking, but parallel to what he did to Melanie. One cannot help but think of the Biblical proverb, “He that sows the wind reaps the whirlwind.” Interestingly, he refers to the rape of his daughter as her disgrace. Although he gives lip service to the idea that she did nothing wrong (“There is no shame in being the object of a crime” Disgrace, p.111), her decision to not seek justice from the police and turn in Petrus’s rapist brother-in-law, is incomprehensible to him. The other side of that coin is his belief that Melanie would never have reported his behavior towards her unless someone else had pressured her to. Yet David may be wrong about Melanie. After all, he never really got to know her. She may have decided on her own to report him to the authorities. Melanie’s rejection of, and pressing charges against, David contrasts with Lucy’s acceptance of the marriage proposal of Petrus. The contrast is confirmed by the meanings of their names; Melanie means “dark,” while Lucy means “light.” Melanie’s rejection of David also contrasts with Byron’s rejection of Teresa. Instead of being like Byron, David is like the discarded Teresa. Even after David has abjectly prostrated himself before Melanie’s mother and sister in supposed apology, he still desires her (as personified by her look-alike sister, Desiree), and seeks her out at the play. Toward the end of the novel, David is reduced to the role he has assigned Teresa in his now degraded opera about Byron, absurdly plucking at the strings of a toy banjo, and insanely bewailing his thwarted desire for Melanie.
There are many aspects of David that would make a reader feel well-disposed to him. His literary inclinations suggest culture and imagination. His love for his daughter suggests tenderness. His treatment of the carcasses of the dogs suggests a kind of empathy. On the surface, David does not seem a bad sort, even if we have to make allowances for his peccadilloes. But upon closer examination, we see that David uses his knowledge of literature to give a gloss of romance and culture to his sordid life; that he fails to protect his daughter, of whom he has no real understanding; and that when he has the chance to put off killing a dog for a week, he decides not to.
The moment David decides to have the dog killed, all hope of redemption for him is gone. Dogs play a central role in this novel. The dogs that Lucy boards are raised not as pets, but as guard dogs in a society that is breaking down. Because of the role they play in protecting wealth from the disenfranchised, they are shot by the three rapists, who are seeking not only wealth, but also domination.

No time to finish—idea of comparison of the story in Milton’s Paradise Lost where Satan rapes his Daughter, whose name is Sin, and the child of that rape is named Death. Look at the hints—David forces himself on Melanie while in his daughter’s bed—another time when he is supposedly comforting Melanie, he almost says something like “tell Daddy about it.”