Winner of the Booker Prize in 1999—an event that made Coetzee the first author to win that award twice—Disgrace presents the elegiac story of a professional and personal disaster in the life of a scholar during his transition from middle age to old age.
The novel features a third-person narrator limited to the thoughts of the protagonist, David Lurie; however, at times the narrative voice seems to speak directly from Lurie’s consciousness, as if he were speaking about himself, and to himself, in the third person.
Lurie is twice divorced, with one adult daughter living on a farm in Grahamstown. At 52, he is satisfied to live alone and make weekly visits to a prostitute for sexual release until the day he sees her in town with her two children. When he calls her at her home rather than her place of employment, she terminates their relationship.
J. M. Coetzee
At loose ends, David is soon attracted to a beautiful young woman who is enrolled in his literature class, and his better judgment cannot restrain him from pursuing an affair with her. For her part, she is too young and inexperienced to know how to handle the attentions of an older man who is also her professor, and after entering into the affair, she resorts to the passive-aggressive defense of sending her boyfriend to intimidate Lurie. His handling of the situation soon lands him before an inquiry board, accused of sexual harassment. As the scandal intensifies, Lurie resigns his position and loses his pension rather than plead guilty and apologize.
He goes to visit his daughter, Lucy, while sorting out what to do next. He intends to write an opera to be called Byron in Italy, and her farm would provide a bucolic retreat after the glare of the inquiry. Her situation is increasingly precarious, since her farm is directly in the sights of Petrus, an ambitious African whom she first employs and later fears as his control of the farm increases.
David volunteers at an animal clinic where the main business is putting to sleep the unwanted pets that have been rescued. A violent attack occurs at the farm; Lucy is raped and beaten, and David is splashed with acid. He is descending into a more and more hellish existence, sometimes because of his folly, and sometimes through no fault of his own.
All the while, as an educated and literate man, he is aware of the ironies associated with his misfortunes, and he increasingly feels that the world no longer has a place for him that he would care to accept. Touchingly, David’s old-fashioned pride does not obscure his intelligence or prevent him from learning new lessons from those he once would have avoided. He is able to accept responsibility for his disgrace, and even to seek forgiveness from the injured parties. When he remains unforgiven, he is even able to accommodate this snub while also marveling at the human ability to endure ever-greater hardships.
Coetzee uses his aging protagonist, with his self-centeredness and his repulsion for the world that has grown up around him, as an illustration of the inexorably tragic direction of human life toward death. He creates an intense poignancy in David’s growing awareness of mortality—his own and that of all life—by highlighting the self-reflexive nature of human consciousness. Not only must we die, David learns; we must go into that darkness knowing full well its finality.
Bibliography
Barnard, Rita. “J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and the South African Pastoral,” Contemporary Literature 44, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 199–224.
Cornwell, Gareth. “Realism, Rape, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 43, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 306–22.
Kossew, Sue. “The Politics of Shame and Redemption in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 155–62.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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