Disgrace

My bus leaves in half an hour, so I probably won't do this justice. But I will do my best.

Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee
Vintage, 2000
220 pages
ISBN 9780099289524
Recommended by: Jesse




I read this book more or less in one day. A weekday, even; I think it was Thursday last week. It's short, which helps, but it was also the style-- simple, minimalist, almost tense, spartan prose. A big change from the last two novels I read, which were sprawling, breathless, hugely complex (those adjectives mostly apply to Midnight's Children, but "breathless" certainly to the Eggers book as well). Not that Disgrace isn't complex; one of the most incredible things about it was its ability to suggest, with a few words, a dissertation's worth of material on an incredible variety of subjects-- evil, politics, gender-- anything. The simplicity and brevity of the novel makes its plot and subject matter more powerful, as if it were more concentrated.

Briefly: The first chunk of the book is a fairly classic story of a professor, David Lurie, in liberal arts (in this case, language studies, relocated to a technical university and dissatisfied) who has an affair with a student and is forced to resign from his position. Thus disgraced, he moves to his daughter's farm to take some time off, work on an opera about, fittingly, Byron's last days in Italy. The story hereafter is one that moves in opposite directions, towards Lurie's redemption, but also, in its depiction of a violent attack on Lurie and his daughter, of further disgrace and the exposition of the violence deeply ingrained in both human nature and post-apartheid South Africa.

I read this book largely because of a paper I want to write, or re-write. I mentioned my interest in speaking and silence earlier; it comes from a paper I wrote last year for a course in postmodern philosophy on Derrida and forgiveness. It was the last paper of my degree, I think; I was exhausted and did not do a very good job, but the topic has stayed with me. Derrida talks about South Africa and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the interview I used for the paper, and since then I have wanted to read Disgrace so I can use it in my discussion of speaking, silence and forgiveness.

Which I will think more carefully about when I get around to writing the paper. I hope I do; I'd like to redeem myself for doing such a poor job with a topic I'm so interested in.

The topic of speaking and silence first came up for me in studying Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. Titus's daughter Lavinia is violently raped, and then has her tongue and her hands cut off so she is completely incapable of communicating the violence done to her. Silence is, of course, often associated with sexual abuse, and so poor Lavinia is the perfect image of this sort of violence. Silence, in this sense, also plays an important part in Disgrace; "Silence," says Coetzee, "is drawn over the body of the woman like a blanket." (I'll double check that when I get home.) Silence is not reserved, however, for sexual violence, but also for the systemic, political, racial violence that has left its scar on South Africa. I mentioned Salman Rushdie's tension between explicit explanation and circumlocution; Coetzee's prose is much more direct and lacks the room for that kind of back-and-forth; however, isn't the minimalism defined by the importance placed on negative space-- what is not said is just as important as what is said, and what is absent becomes remarkably present in its very absence. Coetzee hardly mentions racial violence, barely mentions race at all, never mentions apartheid directly, and yet it haunts the text, infecting every action and interaction. Silence here marks all kinds of violence; flags it, invisibly.

So hopefully I'll be able to investigate that more fully after doing more reading on the subject. Next time: reflections, possibly on gender, on Milan Kundera's very beautiful The Unbearable Lightness of Being.