Closure in Disgrace

Closure in J. M.
Coetzee’s Disgrace
A cognitive approach
Sara Saei Dibavar, Pyeaam Abbasi and

Hossein Pirnajmuddin
University of Isfahan
This article explores the politics of J. M. Coetzee’s writing style in Disgrace.

Drawing on Marie-Laure Ryan’s theory of textual universe and Barbara
Dancygier’s narrative space construction strategies, we argue that Coetzee’s
narrative is set up to expose David Lurie’s deliberately distorted self-
representation. Indeed, the conflict between the protagonist’s private worlds
and the textual actual world (TAW) results from the protagonist’s distorting
of the TAW by his deliberately distorted self-representation clouding his
judgment and, accordingly, his so-called knowledge worlds (K-worlds). Also
discussed is the process through which the protagonist is brought to a reck-
oning – not grace – through ontological re-orientation by undergoing a
three-step process of social stigmatization, recognizing his vulnerability and
situatedness, and coming to terms with his actual environment (TAW).
Keywords: Barbara Dancygier, cognition, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Marie-

Laure Ryan, narrative spaces, textual actual world (TAW)
1. Introduction
John Maxwell Coetzee is one of the most controversial novelists of South African
origin. Coetzee’s critical acclaim rests on challenging his readers through intertex-
tual narratives in which he echoes many scholars and writers from Nietzsche and
Derrida to Beckett and Kafka. Combining narratological strategies with author-
ial games, Coetzee touches upon the subtleties of the human condition to depict
man’s ontological and epistemological enigma. As a notable case in point, his
1999 novel Disgrace has fascinated, challenged and (mis)guided critics of various
schools by simultaneously “inviting and then resisting interpretive closure” (Conti
2016: 472). Disgrace is the story of Professor David Lurie, a white Professor of
Communications and Romantic poetry at Cape Town Technical University in
https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00016.dib
English Text Construction 12:1 (2019), pp. 1–28. issn 1874-8767 | e‑issn 1874-8775
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
2 Sara Saei Dibavar, Pyeaam Abbasi and Hossein Pirnajmuddin
postapartheid South Africa whose present ambition is to compose a chamber

opera celebrating Byron’s adventures with his ladylove, Teresa. The reader soon
learns that David fills his loneliness by engaging in a relationship with a prostitute
named Soraya. However, seeing Soraya in the street with her children, coupled
with David’s attempt to contact her outside their arranged meetings, leads to
the termination of David’s ‘bliss’ and drives him to prey on one of his students,
Melanie Isaacs, and later to falsify her marks when she does not show up for an
important test. When Melanie files a complaint, despite the many opportunities
given to him by the disciplinary board at the university, David remains unrepen-
tant and is, therefore, forced to resign. Having been dismissed from his teaching
position, he moves from Cape Town to his lesbian daughter Lucy’s smallholding
in the Eastern Cape. Arriving at the apparently calm neighborhood of his daugh-
ter, David meets Petrus, a black man originally working for Lucy as a dog-man,
but presently a co-owner of Lucy’s land. He also meets Lucy’s friends, notably Bev
Shaw, with whom he develops an intimate relationship while working at the ani-
mal clinic where they give redundant dogs ‘graceful’ deaths. Not long after, Lucy
and David are attacked by three black men whom Lucy lets in to make an emer-
gency phone call. The men rape Lucy, attempt to set David on fire, shoot all the
dogs Lucy is boarding except one, and drive off in David’s car with their loot.
When the police are notified, Lucy keeps the rape episode to herself as a private
matter. Baffled by the circumstances, and suspecting Petrus as the organizer of
the attack, David desperately struggles to convince Lucy to seek legal help but
fails. Some time later, Lucy and David see the youngest of the rapists – Pollux – at
Petrus’ party and understand that he is Petrus’ kinsman. Conflicts that develop as
Lucy and David argue over Pollux’ presence lead to David’s leaving the farm. He
tries to apologize to Melanie’s father during a short visit to their house, where he
sees, and is filled with desire toward Melanie’s sister. Later, David returns to Cape
Town to find his house broken into and his neighborhood still hostile. Addition-
ally, he experiences difficulties with the opera project. Not long after, suspecting
there is something wrong with Lucy, he returns to the Eastern Cape and finds out
about Lucy’s pregnancy and her wish to keep the child. The final blow is delivered
to David when he learns about Lucy and Petrus’ deal whereby she will sign over
the land to him and become his wife in return for his protection. The ending pic-
tures David living in a rented house, helping Bev Shaw, and working on his opera.
The novel concludes with David giving up his favorite dog for euthanasia.
Elusive, complicated and perplexing are the terms that come to mind while
reading this novel about which critical opinion has been deeply divided. First and
foremost, there are those critics who tend to read it politically, often charging
Coetzee with political irresponsibility toward the new rainbow nation of South
Africa. For instance, Kossew (2003) finds fault with the issue of sincerity as
Closure in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace 3
depicted by the novel’s portrayal of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

(TRC) in the form of the disciplinary board which is supposed to deal with Lurie’s
case. Likewise, Brouillette focuses on “(TRC) and its role in postapartheid nation
building” (2007: 130) as well as “black land reclamation” (2007: 133). Bradshaw
asserts that Coetzee’s South African critics find fault with him because they con-
stantly strive to relate the novel’s “fictional state to South Africa in some more or
less allegorical fashion, as though novels only matter when they can be assimi-
lated to or swallowed by some prevailing political discourse” (2010: 12). On the
other side, there are those critics who often start by considering the infamous pro-
tagonist, David, a “thing, a monster, difficult to relate to, perhaps impossible to
love” (McDunnah 2009: 16) and conclude their discussion by bestowing, somehow
forcedly, a state of grace on him and South Africans alike. For instance, Kochin
discusses hope for future salvation in Disgrace, postulating that “there is room
for art, an art that shows our way of life to ourselves, even after the disgrace of
the high culture that Lurie has failed to pass down” (2004: 8). Similarly, DeKoven
reads Disgrace as a “narrative of personal salvation” (2009: 847). There are also
multiple ethical readings that have made related points about the novel. Believ-
ing that Coetzee sees race “discursively inscribed in culture” (Marais 2003: 272),
Marais contends that “instead of withdrawing from history by eliding the [power]
relations which have fashioned South African history, this novel’s use of the pas-
toral foregrounds these relations” (2003: 274). Mardorossian, too, focuses on sex-
ual violence as a point of departure to note that Coetzee’s novel “focuses not on
the attack so much as on the response to it” (2011: 73).
A closer look at the narrative reveals that Coetzee’s plot benefits greatly from
his masterful postmodern play with matters of style and intertextual storytelling.
The complicated, yet understandable world Coetzee is addressing is a space of
hybridity in the sense of Homi Bhabha (1994) – in the context of the aftermath of
the South African political upheaval – constructed in the fashion of postcolonial
writings. Depicted within this fictional world is a space of multivocality in which
new rules and various discourses (of postapartheid) mingle. In this new world,
Van Heerden notes: “Coetzee problematizes the question of how people can live
together in such a way as to recognize both their fundamental interconnectedness
and the singularity and desires of every individual” (2010: 46).
As such, facile interpretation is impeded/ resisted in favor of a negotiated
truth – a fact which echoes Bhabha’s (1994) contention that the new age needs new
critics and fresh outlooks. Adding to this complexity are Coetzee’s layers of nar-
rative, stories within stories and intertextual references which result in the cre-
ation of multiple cognitive worlds, which not only are closely connected, but also
interact and counteract with each other resulting in transworld and transgeneric
identities. Within this multivocal (which is also consistent with multivocality used
earlier in the text) space, David features as an intermediary figure suffering from
a certain kind of cognitive failure which bars him from harmonious co-existence
in the South African context.
Drawing on various theoretical notions in cognitive poetics, in this paper
we offer a reading of Disgrace in an attempt to shed light on the complexity of
Coetzee’s rendering of contemporary epistemological uncertainties and ontologi-
cal wanderings. We bring together Marie-Laure Ryan’s theory of textual universe
and Barbara Dancygier’s narrative space construction strategies as complemen-
tary approaches to serve as the theoretical framework to look into the intricacies
of Coetzee’s world construction. We reconsider the issue of cognition in relation to
the philosophical strain in Coetzee by illustrating the intricate web of connections
within the text (the actual and numerous subjective worlds involved, the influ-
ences they exert upon one another, the deftly juxtaposed notions of fantasy and
reality) to focus on the conflict between the protagonist’s private worlds and what
Ryan calls the textual actual world (TAW; Ryan 1991b: 554). This, we believe, can
provide a new way of interpreting the novel.
Also discussed in this paper is the process through which Lurie is brought to
a reckoning (or awakening) – not grace – through ontological re-orientation by
undergoing three stages of metamorphosis, which find their textual counterpart
through the method of narrative construction. This way, the frequently discussed
ethical encounter as the turning point in David’s interaction with his immedi-
ate surroundings becomes only the last step in his ontological re-orientation fol-
lowing more important stages initiated by the conflict that develops between his
private worlds and the TAW. As a result of this conflict, David is exposed to pun-
ishment by the biopolitical system (a term defined by Foucault (1978); see below)
in the neoliberal state, recognizes his vulnerability (resulting from his situated-
ness) and has to abandon his egocentric outlook on life in favor of reconciliation
with interactive alterity.
2. Narrative (space) construction and the textual universe
Barbara Dancygier’s theory of narrative (space) construction is oriented toward

linguistics while Ryan’s theory of the textual universe is mostly concerned with
interactions between the textual actual world (TAW) and its alternative possible
worlds (APW). Dancygier regards a story as a “cognitive construct, a blend,
emerging through the process of meaning construction triggered by reading”
(2012: 56). Likewise, Ryan argues that the reader enters the text through immer-
sion which is “a state of forgetting language and losing oneself in the textual
world” (2001: 199). Postulating that “[f]ictional narratives rely on a variety of lin-
guistic phenomena, but adapt them to their needs” (2012: 31), Dancygier exam-
ines the cognitive features that are used in analyzing the language of narratives
to access the structural strategies used in the cognitive construction of multilevel
narrative spaces, which she defines “as a variety of mental spaces […] as cognitive
domains activated by the use of linguistic forms, while the purpose they serve is
on-line story construction” (Dancygier 2008: 55). Her theory relies largely on the
earlier work of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner on mental spaces and blend-
ing. In an attempt to “suggest a more precise model for the corresponding linguis-
tic processes and mental constructs,” Fauconnier introduced the notion of mental
spaces as “constructs distinct from linguistic structures but built up in any dis-
course according to guidelines provided by the linguistic expressions” (1994: 16).
Later, in work with Turner, these mental spaces were defined as “small conceptual
packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and
action” (Fauconnier & Turner 2002: 40) to explain their role in blending whereby
“structure from two input mental spaces is projected to a new space, the blend”
(2002: 47). Blending involves a dynamic process during which mappings are cre-
ated between temporary mental spaces: “Building an integration network involves
setting up mental spaces, matching across spaces, projecting selectively to a blend,
locating shared structures, projecting backward to inputs, recruiting new struc-
ture to the inputs or the blend, and running various operations in the blend itself ”
(Fauconnier & Turner 2002: 44).
A narrative space, then, is “a construct which is set up through linguistic
means and continues being elaborated through some parts of the text (possibly
all)” (Dancygier 2012: 37). Accordingly, “the story is a narrative space constructed
on the basis of the contributing narrative spaces, via the processes of conceptual
integration” (Dancygier 2008: 54). Equally important in Dancygier’s discussion of
narrative are the notions of “representation space” and “represented space” which
coexist within the main narrative space and whose integration enriches the nar-
rative. Before dealing with these two interrelated spaces, however, it should be
noted that the method of application of these two notions in this research signifi-
cantly departs from (or rather expands on) Dancygier’s original application. Dan-
cygier uses these terms in her case study of narrative spaces in Margaret Atwood’s
The Blind Assassin (2000) to address objects such as paintings and photographs,
which by their very nature play an important narrative role through represent-
ing a snapshot of reality. She further adds that these objects function as narra-
tive anchors that trigger narrative spaces, which provide further explanatory cues
to guide the readers’ comprehension by bringing the two spaces of representa-
tion and represented together in a final integration blend. Following Dancygier’s
lead, we attempt to use these terms in a broader sense to address the way in which
Coetzee’s Disgrace can be read as a text which benefits from the existence of a rep-
resentation blend. Instead of material objects such as paintings or photographs,

however, we intend to show, Coetzee makes use of images created in the readers’
minds by the textual input in the beginning of the narrative (a mental (incom-
plete) image) and then proceeds to present a comprehensive portrayal of the novel
that contrasts with the early snapshot in the novel (one that shows the complete
image). In this way, the essential characteristics of the two spaces as defined by
Dancygier are preserved. The representation space still functions as a snapshot of
a partial reality. Likewise, the represented space remains “the actual reality it [the
representation space] captures, with its temporal and spatial features, identity of
participants, as well as, crucially, topology available beyond what the representa-
tion shows” (Dancygier 2012: 45). In this sense, the represented space is still the
hidden background (as Dancygier would put it) that needs to be explored and dis-
covered by following the clues dispersed within the narrative space. Finally, it is
only “through a match of the representation space and the represented space” that
the final blend is completed and the emergent narrative space is obtained in its
entirety (Dancygier 2012: 47).
Following the lead of major theorists (including Eco, Pavel, and Doležel
among many), Marie-Laure Ryan elaborates the theory of possible worlds to clar-
ify textual construction and ontology, and to shed light on the semantics of fic-
tionality. Emphasizing that semantic – not psychological – studying of texts is the
aim of possible worlds theory, Ryan agrees with her predecessors that a seman-
tic domain or universe projected by a literary text itself “projects a complete uni-
verse, not just an isolated planet” (1991b: 558). This “non-actual possible world”
(1991b: 554) starts functioning as the textual actual world (TAW) once the reader
engages in reading. Ryan further explains that the ‘textual universe’ becomes “an
imaginary alternative to our system of reality […] as we step into it, we behave as
if the actual world of the textual universe were the actual world” (1991a: 23). Read-
ers’ engagement in this process happens through immersion and recentering:
For the duration of our immersion in a work of fiction, the realm of possibilities
is thus recentered around the sphere which the narrator presents as the actual
world. This recentering pushes the reader into a new system of actuality and pos-
sibility [with] not only a new actual world, but a variety of APWs [alternative pos-
sible worlds] revolving around it. (Ryan 1991a: 22)
Defining immersion in phenomenological terms, Ryan presupposes an imagina-

tive relationship to a textual world with three distinct types of spatial, temporal,
and emotional immersions. She further adds that recentering involves deictic
shifts, which occur by inviting the reader “to relocate to the inner circle of the
narrative action by dissociating the reference of the deictic elements of language
[…] and reassigning it from the perspective of a participant in the narrated scene”
(Ryan 2001: 134). Various other shifts may also occur in the course of a narrative
to meet the demands of the textual world.
Once the reader is recentered, the TAW starts functioning as his actual world
and possible worlds are situated within the periphery of the system. These possi-
ble worlds are characters’ private worlds, including knowledge worlds (K-worlds),
obligation worlds (O-worlds), wish worlds (W-worlds), fantasy universes (F-
universes), and intention worlds. Important to this study are K-worlds, O-worlds,
and F-universes. K-worlds are worlds “whose propositions are assumed to be true
within their reference-world” (Ryan 1985: 722). A “K-world may be not only cor-
rect or incorrect, and complete or incomplete with respect to its reference-world,
but also total or partial” (Ryan 1991a: 115). Over time, depending on the infor-
mation received and processed, characters’ K-worlds expand. O-worlds deter-
mine the individual’s responsibilities within the group. Therefore, an O-world “is
not a creation of the individual, but a contract binding him to the group” (Ryan
1985: 729). As such, O-worlds can often be in conflict with personal W-worlds.
Last but not least are F-universes which are “formed by the mind’s creations”
(Ryan 1985: 730) and serve as “escapes from AW, as true alternatives: dreams,
hallucinations, fantasies, and fictions” (1991a: 111). They are not simply “satellites
of TAW, but complete universes, and they are reached by characters through a
recentering” (1991a: 119). A notable example of F-universes in our study is the
opera David is struggling to compose in an attempt to psychologically re-orient
himself in the world.
Ryan states that the “relations among the worlds of the narrative system are
not static, but change from state to state” (1991a: 119). She further argues that the
goal of the narrative game for its participants “is to make TAW coincide with
as many as possible of their [characters’] private worlds (F-universes excepted)”
(1991a: 119). Therefore, the plot is “the trace left by the movement of these worlds
within the textual universe” (1991a: 119). Ryan’s theory assumes that “some sort
of conflict in the textual universe” (1991a: 120), which she compares to “a satellite
of the actual world leaving its orbit” (1985: 733), “makes for construction of the
plot, which ends when all the remaining conflicts cease to be productive, their
experiencer no longer being willing or able to take steps toward their resolution”
(1992: 544).
3. David Lurie’s (cognitive) quest within the TAW of Disgrace
In this section, we closely examine Coetzee’s sketching of David’s cognitive trans-

formation from an individual detached from his immediate world to one that has
come to terms with the reality of his situated existence.
3.1 Disequilibrium and conflict
Disgrace is a prime example of how narrative construction can playfully affect –

and even mislead – the reader’s interpretation. The narration starts somewhere
in the middle of its protagonist’s life and then has the reader build up their spa-
tial and temporal viewpoints along with the story’s development. The framing
narrative which proceeds chronologically throughout the text is that of David.
Additional details of his life are included as embedded spaces, flashback spaces,
etc. that join in to construct the emergent story. The main narrative space is
organized through internal focalization, which “occurs when the events are,
in general, focalized through a single character or characters in turn” (Palmer
2004: 48). Furthermore, the narrative seems to benefit from an unobtrusive,
off-stage narrator that relates the immediate present of the focalizing character
David – who is not given a narrative voice – to keep “record of the on-line char-
acter’s thoughts and perceptions” (Dancygier 2012: 70) in what is to be revealed
as an instance of “the presentation of consciousness in fiction” (Palmer 2004: 9).
Within this narrative space, David’s consciousness is so dominant that its differ-
ence from the narrator’s disembodied account is barely perceptible. This leads
most critics to criticize the narrative as giving in to David’s focalizing view-
point and hence justifying his damaging actions. Harrigan, for instance, notes
that the language is “astringent and cool; it lacks something; vitality, or passion.
This is because the language arises entirely from David; the free indirect style is
David’s thought, evaporated” (2009: 107). Similarly, Drichel states that “the reader
is caught in the limitations of Lurie’s view of the world, in the structures of his
‘adequating consciousness’” (2011: 155–156). Indeed, David’s unreliable conscious-
ness fits everything to its own structures. While there is no doubt that David’s
is but a limited epistemic viewpoint through which “access to certain facts, but
not others, is assumed” (Dancygier 2012: 61), the fact that David never leaves the
stage makes it difficult to see the narrator’s larger epistemic viewpoint. Nonethe-
less, such narratological precision in depicting the consciousness of a character
has its advantages as well. McDunnah rightfully argues that “far from being a
solely stylistic choice, the narrative voice of Disgrace is fundamentally a mimetic
representation of David Lurie’s consciousness, and therefore a principal means
by which Coetzee creates and illuminates his character” (2009: 16). In fact, the
story’s being attributed to David’s subjectivity reveals his consciousness as one in
which the assumed boundary between fact and fiction is refigured due to David’s
cognitive construction of a fantasy where everything is cloaked in a cloud of
fancy and where he fools himself with the self-induced illusion of having epis-
temic agency, so much so that he regards himself “an old-school, omnipotent
scholar for whom the world is open from end to end, its customs and inhabitants
exposed to his scrutinizing, intrusive and imperialistic gaze” (Azoulay 2002: 33).
As such, the reality of the world presented within the domain of the TAW is
willingly blocked out of his conscious mind because his private worlds (notably
K-worlds and O-worlds) are affected by the dominance of his subjective, self-
induced fantasy. David’s K-world exists as a hybrid of public and private, self and
other, human and animal, etc. Such a binary mode of thought affects his percep-
tion of possible worlds (private, public, self, other, reality, fantasy – all of which
are discursive domains) and results in conflict with TAW. It is this consciousness
that the narrator exposes.
The main narrative space is founded on a descriptive snapshot of David’s life
as he perceives it. Recorded in the first few pages of the novel, this snapshot
depicts David’s supposedly absolute control over his arranged life by recounting
how he manages to obtain the means of his bliss. Upon recentering, the reader
finds himself immersed within this representation space, projected by the narra-
tor’s depiction of David’s viewpoint which is embedded within the larger, macro-
level viewpoint of the narrator. As a descriptive account, not a material one, the
first snapshot functions as a photograph (a captured moment), and hence an
anchor, opening up a narrative space comprising of a blend connecting two men-
tal spaces: the representation space featuring the narrator’s use of David’s focal-
izing, ego-viewpoint (which is full of questions and gaps to be answered) and
on a higher level, the represented space (the actual reality the narrator presents
through a disembodied account). This process of zooming in traps the reader
within the ego-viewpoint of David. In the fragment, there are also clues that will
contribute to the construction of the entire ensuing narrative. The snapshot is
thus a perfect example of a narrative anchor. It opens up a narrative (represented)
space which is essential to the completion of the representation blend. It does
not take long before cross-mappings are created and these two spaces are fully
integrated. Within this space, the reader understands that the omniscient narra-
tor is off-stage, i.e. “does not speak as an independent subjectivity” (Dancygier
2012: 66), and knows David’s spatial and temporal location and follows David’s
moves in the TAW through “story-viewpoint space” (SV-space) to represent his
actions as well as his thought. To Dancygier (2012: 64), SV-space is an “‘outer’ nar-
rative space [which] usually has little or no topology of its own in terms of time,
setting, events, or subjectivities, but it houses a vantage point with the rest of the
narrative in its scope.” “Because of the SV-space,” Dancygier continues, “the story
is presented as if there were a deictic ground for the overall structure” (2012: 64).
The SV-space is located temporally concurrent with respect to the main narra-
tive space and provides coherence. In the first snapshot, the narrator focuses on
the flow of thought in David’s mind so that the input is provided through David’s
(ego) viewpoint. The novel simultaneously offers two viewpoints, that of David
which is deeply personal, tampered with and deliberately distorted, encompassed
within the epistemologically larger and therefore more comprehensive viewpoint

of the off-stage narrator that is greatly dependent on spatial zooming out. The dis-
crepancy that is soon discovered through cross-links between the account given
by the narrator and the earliest snapshot points toward a mismatch between the
two viewpoints at micro (David’s) and macro-levels (the narrator’s) that needs to
be clarified and set right. Once the reader recognizes the discrepancy between
the two viewpoints expressed, he starts perceiving matters differently. Without the
mappings between the SV-space and David’s viewpoint space (without the incor-
poration of the narrator’s encompassing viewpoint), David’s viewpoint space will
hand in an incoherent, false account. In other words, it is only through contrast-
ing David’s viewpoint space with the narrator’s viewpoint space that causal links
become manifest and a deeper understanding of David’s character and his moti-
vations is achieved. Distinguishing between these two spaces is crucial in inter-
preting this narrative because the integration of the representation blend provides
a remarkably different version of what the focalizing viewpoint of David projects.
While the macro-level viewpoint space is constructing the reality of life within
the TAW of the narrative, the difficulty of accessing this higher-level space accen-
tuates David’s viewpoint space. Nonetheless, as the narrative goes on, the repre-
sented space is gradually built within the framing narrative space, a move which
is accompanied by the corresponding spatial shifts (from the enclosed hotel room
to the world of academia, the smallholding and the larger world) that expand
the spatial domain of the represented space – while contracting David’s viewpoint
space – and lead to the integration of the representation blend. This change is also
accompanied by the corresponding metamorphosis in David’s status from cen-
tral – as perceived by him – to marginal at the end of the narrative.
The early snapshot (the representation space) portrays David as attending to
what he thinks he is truly capable of: solving his problems including the prob-
lem of sex. To this purpose, David’s viewpoint becomes the narrative viewpoint
momentarily:
FOR A MAN of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the prob-
lem of sex rather well. On Thursday afternoons he drives to Green Point. Punctu-
ally at two p.m. he presses the buzzer at the entrance to Windsor Mansions,
speaks his name, and enters. Waiting for him at the door of No. 113 is Soraya.
(Coetzee 1999: 1; emphasis added)
This space is founded in David’s early account of having sex with a prostitute
within a snapshot, which transfixes a long-enduring image of David in the reader’s
mind and bestows upon him a deictic (focalizing) presence. This abrupt beginning
also establishes the significance of the problem of sex and its relation to body, sug-
gesting that the concept of body, a major anchor, might have a pivotal role in the
plot to unfold. At face value, abrupt introduction of such a space proves shocking
to the reader since the ludicrously – and mechanically – organized nature of this
meeting escapes the readers’ attention at this point.
What adds to the significance of this scene is the fantasy David’s conscious-
ness projects on it. David’s utterly egoistic fantasy relies heavily on his ability to
delude himself into thinking of it as real through deliberately ignoring his K-
worlds in favor of his W-world, which dictates that he willingly ignore the reality
of the situation (his K-worlds) and act against his better knowledge. His willing
ignorance of the reality of his situation seems to suggest that David is not so much
holding false beliefs than failing to take his correct beliefs into consideration.
Hence, in a conflict that develops between his K-worlds and W-world, he chooses
the W-world as guidance. Arguably, this is made possible to a great extent through
his literary background and his steadfast adherence to the tradition of Romantic
poetry. In this space, “Lurie sees himself, in Bakhtin’s view, as a ‘finalized’ per-
son, and the world as a place where opportunities may be reduced to problems
that need solving” (Boobar 2009: 52). In other words, to himself, he represents a
macrocosm with everything around as subordinate to him. He likes to see himself
in charge in his cognitive universe. The agentive verb “solve” suggests this sense of
agency and power in his “self-appointed role of a Don Juan or love-thirsty preda-
tor” (Karwowska 2014: 89) preying on the beautiful and the exotic who have the
“duty to share” (Coetzee 1999: 16) their beauty.
Co-existent with David’s limited viewpoint is the SV-space that gives the
reader access to David’s impaired judgment/cognitive malfunction through
depicting his infiltration of all that exists around him, and hence his lack of fit as
a member of the postcolonial world. Take, for instance, the way he analyzes his
relationship with Soraya. Willingly ignoring the reality of the situation he finds
himself in (his K-worlds), David quickly fills the space with remarks on how desir-
able he finds it to be, excluding any comment his partner may have regarding
the situation. It is he who “finds her entirely satisfactory” (Coetzee 1999: 1) and
thinks “they have been lucky, the two of them: he to have found her, she to have
found him” (Coetzee 1999: 2) in his “narcissistic fantasies” (Stratton 2002: 84). It
is David who believes “this affection is reciprocated” (Coetzee 1999: 2). Hooper
notes that “Soraya’s consciousness is not actually registered in his understand-
ing of the relations between them. He settles for imagining, rather than finding
out or knowing” (2010: 134). Insignificant as it may seem at this point, the reader
soon learns that such “deep resistance to responsiveness and ‘answerability’ to
others” (Faber 2009: 310) is David’s major flaw as a “self-communing” (Palmer
2004: 9) character. Just like his W-worlds, his K-worlds are also subjective (and
hence defective) because he avoids engaging in discourse worlds which can open
up possibilities for new spaces. To Drichel, this type of reasoning which “reduces
[the other] to the structures of his own perceiving mind” (2011: 155) is indicative of
David’s belonging to the Enlightenment school. Such reasoning, which establishes
the basis of David’s cognitive world, becomes increasingly significant as the narra-
tive unfolds. As Faber observes, David “exposes a deep human resistance to accept
to be undone by the morally binding address of another person, and therefore the
limitations of any discourse – religious, legal, systemic – that would effect change”
(2009: 309–310). This attitude bars him from seeing the world for what it really
is. In other words, David’s deliberately distorted attitude blocks/misrepresents his
view of the state of affairs in the actual world, presented in the TAW, by leading to
his willful ignorance of his K-worlds. Ryan’s notion of conflict is thus activated:
To characterize a narrative situation, it is necessary to take into consideration not

only the relationship of the private worlds of characters with the actual world as it
exists absolutely, but also the characters’ own representation of these relation-
ships. Conflicts may thus involve the unmediated actual world, or the character’s
idea of the actual world. When a character’s K-world misrepresents the actual
world, it will by necessity also misrepresent the relationship between reality and
other worlds of this character’s domain. The character may see a conflict where
none exists…. (1985: 735)
As the plot unfolds, imperfect K-worlds (K-worlds willingly ignored or pushed

aside in favor of following his W-world) instigate a full-scale tension resulting
from David’s ignorance of his O-worlds (which sum up a character’s viewpoint
about their social obligations), and lead to activation of punitive protocols against
the aberrant individual within the social domain. Shortly after the introduction of
the first snapshot, many descriptive details follow to introduce David on a bigger
scale. Manifestation of the represented space (the narrator’s account of the larger
TAW and David’s embodiment within it) coincides with the narrative’s zooming
out of David’s consciousness to build the encompassing space including David
and his surrounding world. David’s viewpoint is quickly immersed within the big-
ger space of the TAW with details forwarded through SV-space. Set against the
TAW, David’s viewpoint starts to deteriorate as the focal center of the narrative.
Also, as the representation blend solidifies, discrepancies between the macro and
micro-level viewpoints become clear. For instance, what becomes eye-catching
about the early snapshot is the standard, organized way in which David carries out
the affairs of the day. Take, for instance, the room in which he and Soraya meet:
“A place of assignation, nothing more, functional, clean, well regulated” (Coetzee
1999: 5). The session is at best a kind of arranged happiness – perhaps too regu-
lated – which is why final thoughts about it end with a reference to Emma Bovary’s
famous afternoon of bliss and the phrase “a moderate bliss, a moderated bliss”
(Coetzee 1999: 6).
Integration of the blend provides further details regarding David’s situation.

For its construction, the narrator benefits much from a flashback space (an
embedded narrative space) to anchor David’s past (which seems to be largely
inaccessible) that is revealed in chunks during the course of the story. Within
this space, the reader realizes that “David is represented in terms of five interre-
lated dynamics: teaching, composing, fatherhood, ageing, sexuality. But it is sex-
uality that seems to me the core to his characterization, around which the others
cohere” (Hooper 2010: 132). The reader also learns about David’s failed attempts
in writing three books and about his present ambition to write music: “Byron in
Italy, a meditation on love between the sexes in the form of a chamber opera”
(Coetzee 1999: 4). The chamber opera introduced here will gradually develop into
a full scale embedded narrative growing along with the main narrative space,
reflecting David’s mental transformations and helping him re-orient himself.
David is the connection between these two spaces. Therefore, the reader has to
incorporate information from both spaces to construct the complete story. Each
time David thinks about the opera, a major shift in his psyche is revealed to the
readers. This embedded narrative is indispensible to the development of the plot
as it has a determining role in the formation of the final blend. Sheils argues that
the opera is the outcome of “David’s retreat into a fantasy narrative” (2003: 38)
due to his increasing sense of alienation. We, however, take this argument further
by adding that the opera is the ‘sanctioned’ fantasy space – considered as a refuge
from disappointment in the TAW – set in contrast to the ‘non-sanctioned’ dom-
ineering fantasy (delusional self-representation) David has projected over the
TAW (which results in disequilibrium in the TAW). As such, the opera space (a
fictional space which is shaped by David’s mind and has the features of what Ryan
calls a fantasy universe (an F-universe)) maintains negative correlation with the
domineering fantasy so that as the former is strengthened and takes shape during
the narrative, the latter dwindles and is pushed away. Finally, the mental com-
pletion of the opera marks the dissolution of David’s deliberately distorted self-
representation of the TAW.
David’s supposed narrative authority is further exposed as fake through the
information provided through the SV-space about his failing life as a supposedly
public intellectual infatuated with his Romantic predecessors:
By profession he is, or has been, a scholar, and scholarship still engages, intermit-
tently, the core of him. He lives within his income, within his temperament,
within his emotional means. Is he happy? By most measurements, yes, he believes
he is. (Coetzee 1999: 2)
In the scope of the TAW, the narrator lets the reader know David and his peers
have developed a sense of non-belonging: “in this transformed and, to his mind,
emasculated institution of learning he is more out of place than ever” (Coetzee

1999: 4). Clearly, David’s life at this point, which is prior to his forced initiation,
is defined by his social role. He is an “intellectually castrated” (Kossew 2003: 157)
professor, even though alienated from his job, belonging to the academy “por-
trayed as deprived of grace by its failure to reproduce the cultural heritage that was
placed in its keeping” (Kochin 2004: 4). David continues his profession basically
“because it provides him with a livelihood” (Coetzee 1999: 5), a fact which reveals
his mechanistic attitude toward his O-world. Teaching also provides him with a
certain honor defined by his institutional role as a professor. Things, however,
have changed. Socio-political changes in postapartheid times have had a drastic
impact on the individual and their broader social circle: “David has for most of
his life occupied a position of centrality in relation to the South African sym-
bolic order […] Over the past several years, however, David has found himself
being pushed to the periphery of the cultural structures of South Africa” (Stratton
2002: 84). As “clerks in a post-religious age” (Coetzee 1999: 4), David and his col-
leagues are left with no legacy. Therefore, David becomes “a living fossil, an evo-
lutionary dead end” (Coleman 2009: 607) or, as Reinhard puts it, “a dead end, the
last of a line” (2009: 95). Coupled with his failed personal life, his social life brings
him to the point of feeling “more out of place than ever” (Coetzee 1999: 4).
SV-space viewpoint depicts David’s life as lonely, insignificant and character-
ized by “ontological insecurity” (Conti 2016: 471). It, therefore, reveals David as
a desiring character with unfulfilled W-worlds and accounts for his attempt to
create a fantasy to ward off alienation and loneliness. Excessive immersion in his
fantasy, however, disturbs the balance between his private worlds and the TAW.
Post explains his alienation in the simplest terms possible: “as David Lurie has
confined himself into his own fairy-tale-like image of what life in South Africa
is like, he has estranged himself from the actual reality he inhabits” (2015: 139).
The more he is immersed in his fantasy, the farther he gets from the reality of his
ontological existence within a transformed (postapartheid) world and the more
helpless he becomes in finding a point of balance between self and other. This is
because his deliberately distorted self-representation clouds his judgment and is
formed at the expense of willful rejection of those K-worlds which are bound to
the TAW. In time, the imbalance he experiences at the personal level affects his
communication with the actual world. David stubbornly resists seeing his situat-
edness in the TAW as “a white man historically conditioned by apartheid’s para-
noid political arithmetic” (Coleman 2009: 601). This is while the TAW is minutely
portrayed as a postapartheid world operating on the basis of the biopolitical sys-
tem of ruling under a neoliberal state, which sanctions “an increase in puritan-
ical surveillance and moralistic denunciation” (Attridge 2000: 102). Biopolitics is
best defined, following Foucault (1978), as a political rationality which operates
through regulatory mechanisms that focus on the body and are linked, either
directly or indirectly, with practices of public health. The concept of biopolitics is
largely derived from the notion of biopower according to which the state power
governs the state through “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the
subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (Foucault 1978: 140). Unlike
the sovereign form of power that could “take life or let live”, biopower is founded
on “a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault 1978: 138).
Beginning in the seventeenth century, Foucault explains, the sovereign-juridical
form of power began to transform, giving way to two forms of power. The first
form was disciplinary power which sought to subjugate the body through disci-
plining it. This form “centered on the body as a machine” (Foucault 1978: 139).
Therefore, it sought “disciplining [of the body], the optimization of its capabilities,
the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility,
[and] its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls” (Foucault
1978: 139). This purpose was met through the disciplinary measures taken. The
second form, which was developed later,
focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serv-
ing as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the
level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause
these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interven-
tions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population.
(Foucault 1978: 139, emphasis in the original)
Together, these two forms “constituted the two poles around which the organiza-
tion of power over life was deployed” (Foucault 1978: 139) to guarantee effective
subjugation of bodies within society. David’s situatedness within this system leaves
him no choice but to acknowledge the reality of his embodied cognition.
Coupled with the biopolitical system is the cultural space of Bhabhaesque
hybridity, an in-between space which has become more manifest in the context
of the new Rainbow Nation. Bhabha (1994) speaks of the Third Space as a liminal
space which has its own new rules. This space, which develops when two or more
individuals or cultures interact, is important in postcolonial discussions because it
exposes the culture as nothing homogeneous. Within this Third Space, “our sense
of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force” (Bhabha
1994: 54) is challenged because the presence of the Third Space “destroys this mir-
ror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an
integrated, open, expanding code” (Bhabha 1994: 54). This new space is, therefore,
opened based not on “the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articula-
tion of culture’s hybridity“ (Bhabha 1994: 56). As a result, the hierarchical claims to
the innate originality or purity of cultures prove invalid because the postcolonial
man experiences a space in which the old condescending look/gaze of the domi-
nant toward the dominated needs to be erased and replaced by a new one based
on negotiations. This space, therefore, can lead to new forms of cultural interac-
tion by blurring the limitations of the existing boundaries provided that the right
viewpoint is taken.
David’s flaw, then, is not that of “a tragic hero” (Kiefer 2009: 267). It is, rather,
his failure as an intellectual to recognize – or rather acknowledge – “the cultural
and historical hybridity of the postcolonial world” (Bhabha 1994: 31), and the pres-
ence of the other as equally active and capable of interaction that leads to his
increasing sense of alienation. The paradox of David’s existence lies in his will-
ful ignorance of his situatedness in a Third Space where through exploration, “we
may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves” (Bhabha
1994: 56). David still sees the long-standing hybrid space in colonial polar terms
because he is following “that ahistorical nineteenth-century polarity of Orient and
Occident which, in the name of progress, unleashed the exclusionary imperial-
ist ideologies of self and other” (Bhabha 1994: 29). This strain in David to fol-
low certain liberal ideologies springs from his outdated Romanticism. David’s
involvement in excesses of imagination disables him, cognitively, to join in with
the rest of the world he acknowledges as altered (hence confirming his subjec-
tive manipulation of his otherwise objective K-worlds). His insistence on resid-
ing in this refuge is self-manipulated into a sort of everlasting shelter where he is
“[i]mmersed in a falsifying Romantic tradition” (Graham 2003: 438), which filters
his own perspective toward the actual world and sets in motion a plot in which his
private worlds and the actual world fall into disequilibrium.
To delineate how his anachronistic mode of thinking – in Romantic, colonial
terms – develops his bitter conflict with the TAW, we need to address the narra-
tive’s handling of a key anchor, the body, which is introduced in the early snapshot
as a desiring body and features prominently during the narrative construction in
the context of the embodied cognition. Since David’s conception of the world at
large is greatly dependent on his body, his transformation is also shaped through
the effects of the environment on his body. The more the narrative zooms out of
David’s enclosed mind, the more the falsified nature of his judgment is revealed
through the narrator’s depiction of him and his transformation as situated, a term
which “is often used to draw attention to the fact that the body is embedded in
and dynamically interacting with an environment” (Shapiro 2011: 124). The theory
of embodied cognition postulates that cognition is deeply dependent on the fea-
tures of the physical body that is in constant interaction with the world. As such,
understanding and perception are not restricted to the mind. Rather, both are the
results of interactive processes:
Embodied realism, as we understand it, is the view that the locus of experience,
meaning, and thought is the ongoing series of embodied organism – environment
interactions that constitute our understanding of the world. According to such a
view, there is no ultimate separation of mind and body, and we are always ‘in
touch’ with our world through our embodied acts and experiences.
(Johnson & Lakoff 2002: 249)
The concept of body as embodied opens up new perspectives – containing dis-

courses which belong to various schools of thought, namely Romanticism, liberal
humanism, and Postcolonialism – into the main narrative space and links various
narrative spaces to each other to provide coherence. Dancygier argues that
“[n]arrative coherence crucially depends on selection of the content needed at a
given point in the story, and on suppression of all information which would reveal
too much or drown the important narrative elements in a chaos of unbounded
verbosity” (2012: 42). This is exactly what Coetzee does; each of his narrative
spaces which are built during the development of the plot feature the body in
interaction with the environment through the lens of a particular discourse. In the
process of narrative construction, the anchor of the body acts as a link-building
agent which reappears in various spaces and holds these spaces together. The
‘body’ changes from the Romantic desiring body (having colonial gaze) in David’s
deliberately distorted self-representation to the body exposed to disciplinary mea-
sures (socially stigmatizing gaze) under the biopolitical system and later develops
into a body among too many bodies – equally vulnerable and interconnected with
other bodies. Through these transformative stages, David faces the reality of his
situated existence, and becomes more primally aware of his corporeal being and
how he is marked through his body.
The body in David’s deliberately distorted self-representation is one shot
through with desire quenching its thirst (satisfying its W-world) by feeding upon
the exotic body of the other in the manner of Casanova and Byron, a master
whom David misreads “as a mere seducer” (Beard 2007: 71). David’s exploration
of exotic bodies is after the fashion of the colonial search for new territories. In
this regard, he is “a man of the city, at home amid a flux of bodies” (Coetzee
1999: 6). In the actual world, however, an individual body is a body politicized.
The body here refers to a biopolitical understanding of the body as a container of
life activated by the discourse of biopolitics, which tries to keep individual bodies
in check through disciplinary systems of panopticon gaze, discipline and punish-
ment as well as hegemonic discourses like those promoted by the Truth and Rec-
onciliation Commission. Under such a panopticon system where an individual’s
body is kept under constant surveillance and is punished for transgression, David
is doomed because of (intentional) failure of his subjective K-worlds in recog-
nizing the anachronism in his thought. David’s willful ignorance of his K-worlds
regarding the current state of affairs leads to the ensuing conflict between him and
his immediate environment which promotes a puritan lifestyle and relies heavily
on recognition of its respective O-worlds.
An unexpected encounter with Soraya and her children in the street kindles
David’s curiosity about her real life and ends “the moderated bliss” (Coetzee
1999: 6) he enjoyed. Lost in the “desert of the week” without his “Thursday inter-
ludes” (Coetzee 1999: 1, 11), he hunts for another companion and becomes “a sex-
ual predator” (Dekoven 2009: 849). Then he meets Melanie, the student he is
supposed to nurture, not prey on. This encounter initiates his unethical behav-
ior – neglecting his O-world to satisfy his W-world – and leads to his downfall. It
is noteworthy that his train of thought during his encounters with Melanie delin-
eates his full awareness (his actively functioning K-worlds) of his transgression:
“he ought to let her go. But he is in the grip of something” (Coetzee 1999: 18). “A
child! He thinks: No more than a child! What am I doing? Yet his heart lurches
with desire” (Coetzee 1999: 20). Safe-guarded by his profession at the academy,
his monopoly over Melanie results in the unfortunate incident of rape. The verb
“rape” is used intentionally to pinpoint David’s agency in misusing his author-
ity and violating his O-world. Graham believes that “Lurie’s misuse of Melanie
exposes power operating at the level of gender” (2003: 437). We, however, argue
that the affair displays something more fundamental, namely power relations,
within academia, where David uses his liberally learnt “hegemonic world litera-
ture from Shakespeare to Byron” (Azoulay 2002: 35) to seduce Melanie by con-
cealing his intentions under the mask of “the elevated language and sophisticated
ideas” (Karwowska 2014: 88). David’s transgression as an individual and more
importantly as a professor instigates conflicts of the O-world, which “occur when
a character’s ‘moral account’ falls in a state of debt through the violation of laws”
(Ryan 1991a: 121). Socially disciplining gaze is turned toward him when he forces
himself upon Melanie while believing “[N]ot rape, not quite that, but undesired
nevertheless, undesired to the core” (Coetzee 1999: 25). Hereafter, his life under-
goes changes that result in his full recognition of his situatedness and precarity.
3.2 Social disciplining and stigmatization
Once David’s atrocity is exposed, he is subjected to severe discipline and pun-

ishment as a member of “the community which is under close scrutiny [in] the
society of academics” (Karwowska 2014: 89). In the TAW (a normalizing biopolit-
ical state), the “correlative constitution of a field of knowledge” (Foucault 1995: 27),
internalized by subjects, enables the smooth operation of biopolitics by subjecting
the body to constant surveillance (panopticism): “It is this fact of being constantly
seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual
in his subjection” (Foucault 1995: 187) and guarantees that no socially aberrant
behavior will last long or go unpunished. This discourse is echoed in David’s con-
tention that “Private life is public business” (Coetzee 1999: 66).
The disciplinary board deals with this notorious case. Imperfect as this newly
established system is – as discussed by Kossew (2003) and Brouillette (2007)
among others – it still provides the newly-established South African society with
some sort of norm to function by, spelling out the norms of the O-world. Fou-
cauldian discourse takes hold of the text as David “is slated to appear before a dis-
ciplinary board on a charge of sexual harassment” (Coetzee 1999: 46) after Melanie
files a complaint. His acting out “as an old-fashioned liberal” (Kelly 2015: 167) and
his rejection of “the committee’s multiple non-legal discourses” (Kelly 2015: 165)
leads to his remaining uncooperative throughout the hearing and exemplifies his
“being unfit for the times in which he lives” (Attridge 2000: 110). David’s immer-
sion within his anachronistic worldview and his liberal ideas of law and justice
bring to him the stigmatization he could have partly escaped if he were prepared
“to issue a statement” (Coetzee 1999: 58) and “to acknowledge [his] fault in a pub-
lic manner and take steps to remedy it” (Coetzee 1999: 58). Unrepentant as his
Byron, David sticks to “playing in by the book” (Coetzee 1999: 55) and ends up
with a publicly recognized scandal and a forced resignation, both of which are due
punishments for his failure in meeting the demands of his O-world. The text at
this point features the public viewpoint delivered through clippings accompany-
ing a photo from a student newspaper whereby the scandal is made public:
The photograph appears in the next day’s student newspaper, above the caption
‘Who’s the Dunce Now?’ It shows him, eyes cast up to the heavens, reaching out a
groping hand toward the camera. The pose is ridiculous enough in itself, but what
makes the picture a gem is the inverted waste-paper basket that a young man,
grinning broadly, holds above him. By a trick of perspective the basket appears to
sit on his head like a dunce’s hat. Against such an image, what chance has he?
(Coetzee 1999: 56)
A bare individual stripped of his socially ordained title and organizational bonds
(disgraced) and subject to the disciplinary force of the socially disapproving gaze,
David is forced to retire to his daughter’s smallholding “to escape from the suffo-
cating atmosphere of public scandal” (Karwowska 2014: 84) and to perform, to his
mind, a literary retreat by taking shelter in the country.
3.3 The reckoning
David’s move to the smallholding opens up a new narrative space to zoom in on

David within the already tangible but ignored Third Space. In this space, the dom-
inance of the TAW increases through simultaneous dwindling of David’s deliber-

ately distorted self-representation and the inevitable expansion of his K-worlds –
which he can no longer ignore. Spatially speaking, too, David’s move places him
within a larger spatial scope where there are “[too] many people, too few things”
(Coetzee 1999: 98) and a weakened disciplinary system. David’s removal from the
center of his ego-centered universe to the periphery of a larger universe margin-
alizes him further. In this space, “the interest in survival (hence the importance
of territory), and the instinct to ensure the continuance of one’s line” (Clarkson
2003: 88) become the driving energy of the narrative. Contributing to David’s mar-
ginalization are the competing spaces of Lucy, his daughter, and Petrus, the dog-
man, who is becoming stronger every day: “It is a new world they live in, he and
Lucy and Petrus. Petrus knows it, and he knows it, and Petrus knows that he
knows it” (Coetzee 1999: 117).
Lucy’s space brings along with it another anchor which is worthy of notice,
the dogs. Their double entrance “coincides with the end of Lurie’s comfortable but
unstable regime of self-deception [and triggers] his journey to personal salvation”
(DeKoven 2009: 850). This anchor evokes several spaces, all of which are included
within the narrative of David’s metamorphosis: representing former “agents of the
enforcement of apartheid” (Dekoven 2009: 850–851), dogs also serve as “vehicles
for David’s character development” (Smit-Marais & Wenzel 2006: 31), a fact which
mainly features in discourse worlds formed about dogs between Lucy and David,
regarding “ontological questions about the overlap between human and animal,
while dismantling conventional dualisms of human/animal, and life/death” (Smit-
Marais & Wenzel 2006: 30). Furthermore, “the dog-figure in Disgrace is strongly
associated with bodily suffering, the threat of shame, the prospect of redemption
and the passage to and from death” (Smit-Marais & Wenzel 2006: 31).
During his sojourn in the smallholding, David develops from a person who
does not identify with the bodily being of the other (either human or non-human)
and to whom animals are from “a different order of creation” (Coetzee 1999: 74) to
a person who cares deeply about the fate and suffering of the redundant dogs, all
the more evidence to his growing sense of embodiment in the world. This step-
by-step transformation is meticulously portrayed by Coetzee. For some time after
his arrival, and despite having taken a blow from the disciplinary system of the
TAW, David’s ego-centered viewpoint is still dominant. An instance of this type
of reasoning is evident in his discourse world with Lucy in which he explains his
attitude toward the disciplinary measures taken against him. His account about “a
golden retriever” (Coetzee 1999: 89), which was beaten with “Pavlovian regular-
ity” (Coetzee 1999: 90) by its owners each time it was excited by the presence of a
female dog, clarifies David’s attitude about what he has undergone:
There was something so ignoble in the spectacle that I despaired. One can punish
a dog, it seems to me, for an offence like chewing a slipper. A dog will accept the
justice of that: a beating for a chewing. But desire is another story. No animal will
accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts. (Coetzee 1999: 90)
The inclusion of this embedded space is crucial with reference to viewpoint man-
agement. Given that the main narrative space is related by a disembodied narrator,
this space offers David’s viewpoint on his life when he moves to the smallhold-
ing. This space will contribute greatly to the understanding of the transformation
that David is about to undergo through his interactions with his environment and
his bodily encounters with his situatedness in a space he shares with Lucy and the
dogs.
David’s move to the smallholding places him within a blended space. This new
liminal space is “a locale of hybridity” (Smit-Marais & Wenzel 2006: 26) in that
it serves as a location that creates and maintains in the reader’s mind a blended
space which brings together the past and the present. Marais rightly notes that
“Coetzee’s choice of geographical locale, that is, the Salem area of the Eastern
Province, invokes a history of frontier wars waged on the issue of land between
the British settlers and the Xhosa people in the nineteenth century” (2003: 275).
As such, acting as a relic of the earlier days of colonialism, the farm foreshadows
conflicts between individuals belonging to different races.
Drawing on Deleuzian becoming, Karwowska calls the farm and the clinic
places in between where “the sudden experience of utter helplessness and being
put in the position of a victim marks a breaking point for David” (2014: 105). This
stage also marks a noticeable increase in David’s uncertainties through presenta-
tion of what Ryan calls the empty center whereby “[t]he text limits its assertions
to worlds at the periphery, avoiding the representation of an actual world […] so
as to leave in doubt which of them holds true in the TAW” (1991b: 567). Conse-
quently, David remains uncertain about what has occurred and what is good or
true. McDunnah emphasizes that the attack – during which David is badly hurt
and Lucy is raped by three black men – results in “Lurie’s grudging awareness of
his interconnectedness, and interdependence” (2009: 32). Similarly, Kiefer notes:
“he comes to accept himself as frail human rather than powerful demon. The
ravisher becomes the ravished” (2009: 274). Indeed, the singularity of the event
is achieved through the workings of the anchor of the body re-activated in this
space. In the narrative space of the attack, David physically experiences the full
horror of victimization. This space which he shares with Lucy and the dogs in
Lucy’s care marks a shocking instance of human brutality to humans and ani-
mals alike. Following this stage is the heightened state of bodily abjection: David’s
burnt scalp, Lucy’s violated body, and the dead dogs all gather in one space to
force David into recognition and acknowledgement of his and their corporeal-
ity. David and Lucy’s bodily abjection can symbolically stand for their ontologi-
cal, political, and social vulnerability. In other words, in this space, the previously
abstract – intangible – idea of vulnerability becomes tangible. David’s stripped,
marginalized body is exposed to vulnerability in Butlerian terms where “[t]he
body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to
the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence” (Butler 2004: 26). David’s
K-world about his vulnerability and situatedness, formed in the aftermath of the
violent assault, finally pushes his deliberately distorted worldview aside. Relying
heavily on a blend in which the earlier scene of Melanie’s rape is reactivated, Lucy’s
rape becomes “the exercise of power by those who have it over those who do not”
(Kossew 2003: 156) and, hence, highlights the Butlerian perspective with regard
to David: “So it has come, the day of testing. Without warning, without fanfare
[.…] How will they stand up to the testing, he and his heart?” (Coetzee 1999: 94)
Acknowledging Coetzee’s affinity with the Butlerian idea of vulnerability, Faber
notes that Coetzee’s Disgrace takes us toward recognizing the human nature of our
being: “The home invasion in the Eastern Cape is an entirely unbidden, unwanted
exposure that flings Lurie into awareness of his ‘injurability’, suffering a terrible
loss of agency, to which he previously felt immune” (2009: 310). Social life entails
this vulnerability because social life is established on the basis of situatedness: “In
a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that
is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we
cannot preempt” (Butler 2004: 29). In case equal vulnerability is recognized, But-
ler claims, it promotes ethical responses and makes for a new ontological existence
which is defined in Disgrace through humans and animals living together. From
the viewpoint of vulnerability, then, recognition of the embodied nature of corpo-
reality of being makes human and animal alike and helps David identify with the
bodily being – and suffering – of the other (even nonhuman, maimed dogs).
Equally important during the attack is David’s “growing awareness of the lim-
its of his Western, anthropocentric value system” (Clarkson 2003: 77) and his con-
scious affirmation of the uselessness of his liberal education: “He speaks Italian,
he speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest Africa”
(Coetzee 1999: 95). His failure in creating new spaces (K-worlds) has stemmed
from his incapacity to participate in discourse worlds. Coetzee’s treatment of lan-
guage in this passage counters the common postmodern ideology that regards
language as forming consciousness. Language here serves as an abstract tool that
opens up new spaces by setting up discourse worlds that can anchor new possi-
ble worlds (here K-worlds) which will prove more reliable than hypotheses David
forms about the events.
Having experienced great horror, helplessness and lack of any viable legal
solutions, David starts to see things differently. “Before Lucy’s rape Lurie moved
in an intellectual world of high literary culture” (Coleman 2009: 607), which was a
mere fantasy that put him in charge. Following the attack, however, an unknown
world he is incapable of deciphering opens up to him due to the conflict that
develops between him and Lucy regarding her reaction to events. This world
shows him the limits of his epistemic viewpoint. Since David’s Romanticism still
has its imperial gaze with it, his attempt to read Lucy and her body as a fictional
space – so much like a text – continues ceaselessly. Nonetheless, Lucy’s so-called
fictional space, despite the marks of rape left on her body and the child she has
been impregnated with, remains elusive to David’s imperialistic attitude. In this
regard, a possible explanation is that “David’s world still oscillates between his
once dogmatic attitude toward law and politics – both of which have already failed
him – and the reality he encounters within TAW, [whereas] Lucy’s world wel-
comes plurality and persuasive discourses” (Saei Dibavar et al. 2018: 81). David’s
interpretation of Lucy’s reaction to her rape as “passive acceptance of victim-
age”, Kossew believes, is deployed against her “pragmatic approach to living in the
new South Africa” (2003: 160). Consequently, David “finds himself in a strained
relationship with a daughter who has made a clear choice. Lucy has defined her
grounds (although some may say at the cost of her body, her property, her dig-
nity)” (Sheils 2003: 48). Perplexed as David in finding “Lucy increasingly unfath-
omable” (Beard 2007: 67), critics strive to explain Lucy’s enigma. Reinhard finds
Lucy “fully caught up in the activities of making [which] may involve a certain
degree of willful blindness, both to the terrible past and to the uncertain future”
(2009: 98). Marais contends that “the passivity of Lucy’s response to her rape is
pivotal: it is meant to be perplexing and to invest her with a degree of alterity that
renders her resistant to interpretation” (2003: 280). Such resistance prevents Lucy
from expressing herself in the framework of a story space to verbalize the trau-
matic experience and relieve the pain. It also impedes the satisfaction of David’s
K-worlds. However, as Hallemeier concludes, “her decision is arguably informed
by an awareness of how a public trial might (re)stigmatize her body as shameful”
(2013: 120). Indeed, it is in Lucy’s best interest not to undergo another violation on
a discursive level since by verbalizing what happened, she will only create another
rape scene which would restate the trauma.
David’s ontological re-orientation is accompanied by the completion of the
process of zooming out in the narrative whereby he becomes not an egocentric
focalizer but a participant in the fictional space of Coetzee’s novel. In this newly
re-constituted universe, K-worlds have regained their proper status and private
worlds are pushed back to the periphery of the modal system where they belong.
David’s F-universe still persists in the form of the embedded opera which now has
Teresa, not Byron, on center stage. This process is more significant than David’s
“becoming-woman” (Karwowska 2014: 109). David has become a being intercon-
nected with other humans and species and capable of respectful recognition of
the unfathomable other. His epistemic stance is now reduced from a delusional
person regarding himself as an all-knowing focalizer to a participant that tries to
recognize and respect the other: “one can never fully comprehend the other and
must respect the alterity – or insurmountable difference – of the other despite the
impossibility of imagined identification with the other” (Wright 2006: 103).
In this light, his structurally unfinished opera is not “a faint echo of ethics”
(Harrigan 2009: 110) or “a failure of the sympathetic imagination” (Wright
2006: 105). It plays a much more significant role than being “a single authentic
note of immortal longing” (Coetzee 1999: 214). It is a space (though fictional) for
the sanctioned existence of the fantasy space which enables and procures con-
tinuation of life within the TAW. Composition of the opera helps David achieve
psychic equilibrium; shifting with his shifts in the world and re-orienting itself
with re-orientations of his mind, the opera provides David with the chance to
transform. Being the only thing David is authoring, even if on a purely cognitive
level, the opera endows him with an altered consciousness, which finally enables
him to participate in the actual world. In other words, the opera that is triggered
to represent David’s ambivalent aspiration toward recognition and immortality
through fame becomes “a contemplative and oral triumph, breaking David free
from his granite temperament and self-regard” (McDonald 2009: 78). This enables
him to connect with the ordinary, illustrated in his relationship with Bev Shaw
and his caring for the dogs. As Beard notes, in this final stage of transformation,
David finally begins to read his masters, Wordsworth and Byron, correctly and
hence finally acquires the ability for empathetic imagination: “Perhaps Lurie will
find that they [Wordsworth and Byron] have guided him despite himself ” (Beard
2007: 73).
4. Conclusion
Disgrace explores the nature of David Lurie’s entrapment within the boundaries
of his own falsifying cognition, which accounts for his self-initiated alienation
from the community by perturbing his connection to his immediate Bhabhaesque
world and triggering the conflict between his private worlds and the TAW – which
cannot accommodate such a deliberately distorted cognition. To belong, there-
fore, David undergoes transformation in the form of a three-step process of social
disciplining and stigmatization, recognizing his equal vulnerability and situated-
ness, and finally submitting to the necessity for ethical engagement with the other.
As such, Disgrace provides its reader with some sort of culmination, however elu-
sive and implicit. This effect is clearly seen in the reorientation of the possible
worlds along with the completion of the narrative process of zooming out whereby
David’s individualistic and ontologically self-grounded viewpoint is replaced by
the narrator’s epistemological disclosure of his precarious, interdependent life.
Furthermore, the ending opens up a space to a hypothetical, grim, but still hopeful
future space Lucy, her child, and perhaps David will inhabit. David’s obsession
with the future in this space can be interpreted as a subconscious attempt to shape
his past and reorient himself in accordance with the current state of affairs within
the TAW. On the narrative level, this future is formed by resituating Wordsworth
in the actual world and removing Byron to the limits of the sanctioned F-universe
of the embedded opera. This future is greatly dependent on the possibilities char-
acters have and the choices they make.
Equally important in the closure Coetzee offers is the sacrifice of the dog,
which is also a site of controversy. While Conti sees “Lurie’s moral transfiguration”
in his “sacrifice of his lamblike dog in the final scene” (2016: 485), Reinhard is con-
vinced that “Lurie’s personal path of penance as the loving Angel of Death for
abandoned animals is merely personal – rather than an act meant to transform
the world he lives in, it merely serves to change his relationship to that world”
(2009: 95). Valorizing the importance of such a personal salvation in seeing the
world in its actuality, this sacrifice is the first step to such “a new footing, a new
start” (Coetzee 1999: 218) where, as Beard rightfully argues, our “final view of him
is reminiscent of another Wordsworthian figure, the weeping shepherd necessar-
ily giving up the last of his flock in the poem of that name” (2007: 69). Having
removed the cloud of fantasy through coming to terms with his embodied exis-
tence, this transformed figure can now identify with the bodily being of the other
(the maimed dog he relieves of its pain) and move toward reconciling with life in
the actual domain of the TAW.
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Address for correspondence
Pyeaam Abbasi
Faculty of Foreign Languages
Department of English Language and Literature
University of Isfahan
Azadi Square
Isfahan
Iran
abbasi@fgn.ui.ac.ir
Co-author information
Sara Saei Dibavar Hossein Pirnajmuddin

Faculty of Foreign Languages Faculty of Foreign Languages
Department of English Language and Department of English Language and
Literature Literature
University of Isfahan University of Isfahan
sa.saei@fgn.ui.ac.ir pirnajmuddin@fgn.ui.ac.ir

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Closure in J. M.

Sara Saei Dibavar, Pyeaam Abbasi and

This article explores the politics of J. M. Coetzee’s writing style in Disgrace.

Keywords: Barbara Dancygier, cognition, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Marie-

postapartheid South Africa whose present ambition is to compose a chamber

depicted by the novel’s portrayal of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

2. Narrative (space) construction and the textual universe

Barbara Dancygier’s theory of narrative (space) construction is oriented toward

resentation blend. Instead of material objects such as paintings or photographs,

Defining immersion in phenomenological terms, Ryan presupposes an imagina-

3. David Lurie’s (cognitive) quest within the TAW of Disgrace

In this section, we closely examine Coetzee’s sketching of David’s cognitive trans-

3.1 Disequilibrium and conflict

Disgrace is a prime example of how narrative construction can playfully affect –

within the epistemologically larger and therefore more comprehensive viewpoint

To characterize a narrative situation, it is necessary to take into consideration not

As the plot unfolds, imperfect K-worlds (K-worlds willingly ignored or pushed

Integration of the blend provides further details regarding David’s situation.

emasculated institution of learning he is more out of place than ever” (Coetzee

The concept of body as embodied opens up new perspectives – containing dis-

3.2 Social disciplining and stigmatization

Once David’s atrocity is exposed, he is subjected to severe discipline and pun-

3.3 The reckoning

David’s move to the smallholding opens up a new narrative space to zoom in on

inance of the TAW increases through simultaneous dwindling of David’s deliber-

Boobar, James. 2009. Beyond sympathy: A Bakhtinian reading of Disgrace. In Encountering

Address for correspondence

Sara Saei Dibavar Hossein Pirnajmuddin

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