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Journal of Southern African Studies
Coetzee and Post-Apartheid South Africa
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
Review by: David Attwell
Source: Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Dec., 2001), pp. 865-867
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 27, Number 4, December 2001
Book Reviews
Coetzee and post-apartheid South Africa
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London, Vintage, 1999), 219 pp., ?14.99 hbk, ISBN
0436204894.
Readers who follow Coetzee closely will have become wary of too easy a linkage between historical
events and their fictional reprisal in his novels. If it is the case that history, or historical consciousness,
is seldom given a priori status, it would be safe to assume that it would be better to look elsewhere
for the fiction's deeper forms of investment, and indeed, the more significant categories in Coetzee
have frequently been the aesthetic and the ethical, or the aesthetic and ethical in combination. Given
this record, one should be cautious in discussing what is Coetzee's first serious encounter with
post-apartheid South Africa in quite these terms.
Except that, in Disgrace, he accepts the invitation to take on post-apartheid South Africa in all
its ambiguity. This goes further than the selection of the milieu, for it is built into the novel's temporal
structure as well. In fact, 'post-ness' is woven seamlessly into the consciousness and fate of the
central character, David Lurie, and its pertinence is made explicit in a particular verbal configuration
that Lurie teaches his students. That configuration is the 'perfective', a syntactic marker of aspect
within the perfect tense. Lurie brings this awareness out in a moment such as the following:
Two weeks ago he was in a classroom explaining to the bored youth of the country the
distinction between drink and drink up, burned and burnt. The perfective, signifying an action
carried through to its conclusion. How far away it all seems! I live, I have lived, I lived. (p. 71)
A more complete description of the perfective would note that the action that has been carried
through to its conclusion lies in the recent, rather than the distant, past and that its consequences are
still very much in evidence. Post-ness, indeed. Usurp, burn, live and drive are verbs that are rendered
in the perfective at various moments, with ever-widening implications. These usages refer, inter alia,
to the attack on Lurie and his daughter, Lucy, at her farm (burned-burnt); to the desire that runs
through him (as he explains afterwards) for Melanie, the young student (burned-burnt); to the
cremation of the unwanted dogs that Lurie helps to euthanise at the animal welfare clinic (burned-
burnt); and to the desire that leads to Lucy's being gang-raped in the attack (drive-driven).
Incidentally, there are a number of ways in which desire and burning are linked in this novel, too
many to enumerate fully here; suffice to point to the larger implications of this connection in Lurie's
reflection, 'Omnis gens quaecumque se in se perficere vult. [Loosely: 'Every nation, whatever it is,
wishes to perfect itself in itself.'] The seed of generation, driven to perfect itself, driving deep into
the woman's body, driving to bring the future into being. Drive, driven' (p. 194). The pathologies
underlying the cruelties of history, this passage seems to suggest, have a social-biological foundation
in the 'seed of generation', what Lurie elsewhere calls 'snake-venom', enforcing nature's grand
design. The novel's most intense passages explore the consequences of this life-giving, and
death-giving, energy.
The syndrome Lurie lives out, then, as the embodiment of the perfective, is both the result of the
attack in which he is burnt, and of his own unrestrained desire
-
ironically, a condition he shares with
his daughter's rapists. Lurie is both victim and agent of destruction. But the syndrome of living on,
'after the storm' (a phrase used with reference to George Grosz, well known for satirical illustrations
of Weimar decadence) also relates to the general historical situation of the novel, which the first third
of the text is careful to establish. Lurie is -
not to put too fine a point on it
-
living beyond his time.
As he recognises, 'his mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else
to go' (p. 72); his is 'a case that can no longer be heard, basta' (p. 89). Lurie's curiosity about, and
abandonment to, sensual impulse, and his aestheticisation of desire, no longer have any cultural
weight in the world he lives in. His ego has been nurtured in Romanticism and modernist irony, but
even his university has abandoned his icons, placating him with a course on the Romantics for the
ISSN 0305-7070 print; 1465-3893 online/01/040865-13 (? 2001 Journal of Southern African Studies
DOI: 10.1080/03057070120090721
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866 Journal of Southern African Studies
sake of morale, but in reality wanting his labour only to teach functionalist communications theory.
In a certain paradoxical sense, it is Lurie who has no culture, since there is nothing to embrace him.
The corporatisation of academic life (behind that post-Cold War globalisation) refracted through the
end of apartheid, leave him historically marooned, but his manicured masculinity enables him to get
away with it, for a short while, before history catches up with him.
It does this on two occasions: in his disciplinary hearing for sexual harassment at the Cape
Technical University, and later, in the attack on his daughter's farm, where he goes to recuperate after
becoming a spectacle. The hearing is significant in several ways, not least because it is, in fact, the
only occasion when what we might call the public sphere is in evidence in the novel. Coetzee's
account of post-apartheid South Africa leaves the public sphere out almost entirely: there is no state,
constitution, or law, to speak of, only a relentless working-out of the passions governing rural South
Africa, as the sump of history. In fact, post-apartheid South Africa is undergoing a kind of recession
of modernity, in which the tides held back by decades of social engineering are beginning to wash
back. On the N2 outside Cape Town, the 'stream of cars has to slow down while a child with a stick
herds a stray cow off the road. Inexorably, he thinks, the country is coming to the city. Soon there
will be cattle on Rondebosch Common; soon history will have come full circle' (p. 175). In this
context, post-enlightenment dreams of rainbow-nationhood being cooked up in Parliament may well
be irrelevant. Except that the public sphere, broadly, does make a brief appearance in the hearing, in
which the obvious point of reference is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Lurie's
refusal to offer the desired tone of penitence, while admitting guilt, becomes the focus of attention
in this passage, so one is drawn to the conclusion that an institutionally driven quest for confession
and reconciliation is really simply another Foucauldian device of regulation, and in Lurie's terms,
another attack on the notion of a private life. (That the actual TRC avoided making atonement a
condition of amnesty places Coetzee in agreement with it, however, not in opposition, as one might
assume from this.)
The other occasion when history catches up with Lurie is in the attack on Lucy's farm. Here an
impulse toward allegory is most in evidence in the novel, since the farm is carefully positioned in the
heart of the Eastern Cape, indeed Kaffraria, at Salem ('Peace') during the early years of land reform,
which makes Disgrace a reprisal of the farm novel tradition, which Coetzee himself has explored in
White Writing, In the Heart of the Country, and Life and Times of Michael K. The two figures who
carry most allegorical weight are the rural landowners who must negotiate a future together: Petrus
(Peter, the Rock, bearer of an historical destiny), the former farm-hand who knows his time has
arrived, and Lucy, heir of a settler history, attempting to live lightly, as a post-industrial-age hippie,
on the simple routines and pleasures of rural life, but who cannot avoid becoming the representative
of settlerdom's long history of appropriation. Lucy's rape is a case, however, of paying for the sins,
not only of the fathers, but also of her own father, whose seduction of Melanie had a degree of
coercion about it. When David's efforts to counsel Lucy are rejected, with Lucy using silence to
recover a sense of her own agency and identity, one is made acutely aware that his position is deeply
compromised, as a near-rapist himself, despite the aestheticisation of his passions.
The settlement reached by Lucy and Petrus by the end of the novel is disturbing indeed: having
connived in the attack on the farm and in Lucy's rape, Petrus uses Lucy's vulnerability to make a
move on her property; Lucy, in turn, lesbian but carrying a rapist's child, refuses an abortion, and in
order not to be defeated by being driven off the land, contemplates becoming the latest addition to
Petrus's polygamous household. Lurie cannot absorb this, partly because it is not an especially
plausible outcome; it is best thought of as allegorical, representing the extreme case in the working
out of what it might mean for a white person to take on an African identity - certainly it is difficult
not to see this as a repudiation of facile assertions by whites of their Africanness. Furthermore,
Coetzee's reprisal of the postcolonial trope of the expectant mother-of-the-nation makes the nation (if
such this is) the producer of a bitter, and ambiguous legacy.
To return to David Lurie, his state of 'disgrace' is tied up with living beyond one's time, living
in an age that has withdrawn any possibility of understanding, compassion, forgiveness. The novel's
central core of selfhood has become othered by history itself, rendered useless and even comic,
despite the pain of being criminally tortured by being burnt. Interestingly, the particular temporality
of Disgrace lies in its being located after the 'end-of-history', which was Coetzee's metier in earlier
phases of his writing.
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Book Reviews 867
What is the redundant self to do, then? Lurie develops two projects in which an ambiguous
accommodation to his fate begins to emerge: he helps to put down abandoned dogs (mainly from the
township) at the animal welfare clinic in Grahamstown, and he writes a chamber opera based on one
of Byron's last affairs. The story of the writing of the opera is one of a progressive thinning-out, or
etiolation. While it begins with sonorous invocations - in the manner of Gluck's Orfeo - of the grand
passion between Byron and Theresa Guiccioli, it gradually abandons Byron himself and switches to
a later period, long after Byron's death, to foreground a middle-aged Theresa singing of her lost love
and youthfulness. Theresa thus answers to David's sense of living in the aftermath of a life of desire.
Of course, it is significant that Lurie is able to place himself in the feminine position at this point,
a counter-movement to his earlier investment in careless masculinity. Any thought, however, that the
opera is likely to dignify a life of permanent post-coital recession is lost, when the prevailing genre
of the opera shifts from elegy to comedy, with Theresa's lines being accompanied by the plucking
of a home-made township banjo. Art may transform, but it does not follow that it will always console.
As the novel ends, Lurie is holed up in Grahamstown, awaiting the birth of his grandchild, keeping
himself occupied by giving the dogs a dignified end. It is, of course, himself that he ministers to,
holding the animals lovingly as the needle finds its mark and then bundling them up for the
incinerator. The fires of his sexuality
- he speaks of it in those terms to Melanie's father -
and of
his being burnt by attackers, are metonymically linked to these moments of conflagration in which he
helps to transport dogs to the other world. This is the clearest of those moments when Coetzee opens
up the realm of a secular sublime, where the cancelling imperatives of simple ontology, of being a
creature of energy, outweigh the failures of history. There is no redeeming consciousness in the
humanity depicted in the novel; therefore, if grace is available at all, it will lie in simple acts of love
that will enable the world's creatures to die graciously. Ontological consciousness thus takes the place
of historical consciousness - not existentialism, exactly, since there is nothing programmatic about the
novel's resolution, only a shift to a more elemental layer of meaning. It is a shift we have seen before,
in Michael K, for instance, whose durability is both less, and more than, human.
DAVID ATTWELL
University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg
Environment and water: critical viewpoints
Environment
M. Chenje, Reviewing the Southern African Environment: A Media Handbook
(Harare: Southern African Resource and Documentation Centre; Southern African
Development Community Environment and Land Management Sector; ICUN -
World Conservation Union, 1998), xi + 271 pp., ?10.95/$18.95 pbk, ISBN 1-77910-
002-7.
This book gives the scoop on southern African environmental reporting, at least on the environmental
reporting that its publishers, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the World
Conservation Union (IUCN), would like to see. The subtext of the book is that the environment is
newsworthy primarily as a resource for economic development. Therefore, it exhorts journalists to
give favourable coverage to environmental policies that promote economic development.
The guide contains much useful information for a journalist. Tables give population histories
(although they cite early data uncritically). Helpful appendices summarise environmental conventions
ratified by SADC countries and give the Rio Principles. The book also recommends further reading
and lists contact people in the SADC. A glossary gives user-friendly translations to technical terms,
although I hope the example about 'meaningless technical language' is written in jest. Rather
than 'The wolf spider Lycosa pseudoannulate is an effective predator of certain rice pests', the
handbook prefers: 'Wolf spiders are our friends. They hunt and kill the insects that harm your rice'
(p. viii).
The guide gives short, accessible chapters on important environmental topics: population, water,
marine environments, biological diversity, forests, protected areas, air pollution, and environmental
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