J. M.

Coetzee’s Disgrace

Dr. Seyyed Shahabeddin Sadati

Assistant Professor at Islamic Azad University
 J. M. Coetzee

• Born 1940 in Cape Town

• Served in WWII for South
Africa in Italy
• Began fiction in 1969
• Won Booker Prize in 1999
• Won Nobel Prize in Literature-
2003
• Taught in the U.S. frequently
• Emigrated to Australia in 2003
Coetzee & Writing

• For Coetzee, writing is clearly an answer to what he

explains as his feelings of helplessness before the fact of
suffering in the world. Coetzee’s novels seem to replay the
agony of his implication in apartheid. In this sense, then,
his novels would seem to be manifestations of a
melancholic or even masochistic and repetitive
compulsion. However, they are a mode of protesting this
forced connection. They are minimal, highly qualified
forms of action; as a mode of waiting for the end of
apartheid, they too hang undecidably between activity and
passivity.
 Purpose of Disgrace

• The gist of Disgrace is to show that

no matter what obstacles we meet
(racial, sexual, relational) life will
continue.
• Although the world is constantly
changing (in areas such as: race,
animal treatment, family relations, and
reputations) knowledge and love can
help us overcome.
• Death is an imminent and constant
part of life that we should be aware of
in our daily life.
 Themes of Disgrace

• Sexuality
• Race
• Rape
• Justice
• Animal Treatment
• Family Relations
• Reputations
• Knowledge
Post-Apartheid
South Africa

• Coetzee has very brilliantly incorporated many themes

within this 220 pages long book, but the most important
one is how the people in South Africa are dealing with
change in the racial hierarchy now that the apartheid is
over.
Apartheid

• Apartheid was a system of legal racial segregation

enforced by the National Party government in South Africa
between 1948 and early 1994. Racial segregation in South
Africa began in colonial times, but apartheid as an official
policy was introduced following the general election of
1948. New legislation classified inhabitants into racial
groups (“black”, “white”, “colored”, and “Indian”), and
residential areas were separated by means of forced
removals.
Apartheid

• The government segregated education, medical care, and

other public services, and provided Black people with
services inferior to those of Whites. During apartheid not
only mixed-race marriages but also interracial sex was
forbidden. Every individual was classified by race. If the
race of an individual was ambiguous, a committee was
formed to settle the matter.
Apartheid

• Reforms to apartheid in the 1980s failed to quell the

mounting opposition, and in 1990 President Frederik
Willem de Klerk began negotiations to end apartheid,
culminating in multi-racial democratic elections in 1994,
which were won by the African National Congress under
Nelson Mandela.
 Post-Apartheid
• Post-apartheid South Africa was by no means idealized,
however. Violence increased significantly in the country.
Incidents of car stealing increased, and many commercial
farmers either emigrated or gave up farming because of
violence committed against them. From 1989 to 1994 the
murder rate doubled, and a young South African woman
could be expected to be raped twice in her lifetime on
average. The changing landscape encouraged many of the
wealthier South Africans to move into gated communities.
The circumstances of life in Post-apartheid were the same
like before. The only thing that changed was the power
position/relation.
 Post-Apartheid

• South Africa after apartheid still provides horrors to be

punished, though now the shoe is on the other foot.
Whites, however innocent, can be the victims of black
revenge. Petrus and the other black people are in the
position of colonizer, and White people like David and his
daughter Lucy are colonized.
Violence

• In the new South Africa, violence is released in new

ways, and David Lurie and his daughter Lucy become
victims. The battle between different races (especially
black and white people) is clear. This novel takes its
inspiration from South Africa’s contemporary social and
political conflict, and offers a bleak look at the country.
 Transition and Racism

• The novel tries to show how the people are dealing with
the shift in social order in a post-apartheid South Africa.
• The whites no longer hold any significant power but the
status of the blacks is rising day by day as evident in the
character of Petrus.
• Petrus initially refers to himself as the “dog-man” and he
indeed used to be that once upon a time–a disenfranchised
black man who did nothing but work in Lucy’s garden and
fed Lucy’s dogs. But now in the ‘new’ South Africa he is
the one who is in power–the one with majority of the lands
and influence over the area.
Transition
and Racism:
Memory of
Racism

• Despite this transition from the old to the new, the black
people in South Africa seem not to have forgotten what
they were victims of in the past as such remarks keep
popping up in the novel. Once such instance is when one
of the commission members claims David Lurie’s sexual
harassment of Melanie to be racially motivated:
 History of Exploitation!
• “We are again going round in
circles, Mr. Chair. Yes, he says,
he is guilty; but when we try to
get specificity, all of a sudden it
is not abuse of a young woman he
is confessing to, just an impulse
he could not resist, with no
mention of the pain he has
caused, no mention of the long
history of exploitation of which
this is part.”
Transition
and Racism:
A New
Apartheid

• Even Lurie seems to think that Lucy’s not reporting the

rape to the police is due to her “wish to humble” herself
“before history”. He believes that she thinks she has to
compensate for the past atrocities on the blacks all by
herself and they are even allowed to take revenge from
them. She just sees the rapists as “debt-collectors”.
Transition
and Racism:
A New
Apartheid

• This is indeed a very bleak picture of the “new” South

Africa where although the apartheid has ended the
oppressed has become the oppressor. This is one of the
main reasons that this novel has been claimed to be
racially skewed.
 Violence & Destruction
• The signs of apartheid still shape South African politics
and society. Even though apartheid has legally ended, its
legacy still haunts the country. Robbery and destruction
visit frequently the countryside. Rape is a common
occurrence. The outrage from a history of oppression and
violence cannot be suppressed. The question of whether
post-apartheid South Africa will in fact allow an
untroubled pastoralism to emerge animates Coetzee’s
novel Disgrace, and the answer it seems to give is no.
Even “not yet” seems too optimistic.
 Violence and Rape
• Violence especially sexual violence can be seen throughout
the book. Disgrace holds out little hope for the “new” South
Africa as it first displays the rape (presumably) of non-white
woman (Melanie) by a white man (Lurie) and then later on the
gang rape of a white woman (Lucy) by the three black men one
of whom is Petrus’ kin. This does highlight the fact that even
though the apartheid may be over, the racial problems still
aren’t.
 Violence and Rape
• The scene when Lucy is raped is perhaps the most violent
in the whole novel:
“A blow catches [Lurie] on the crown of the head … He is
aware of being dragged across the kitchen floor … He is in the
lavatory, the lavatory of Lucy’s house. … The door opens;
knocking him off balance… ‘The keys,’ says the man … The
man raises the bottle … [Lurie] speaks Italian, he speaks
French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest
Africa … Mission work: what has it left behind … Nothing that
he can see … Now the tall man appears from around the front,
carrying the rifle. With practiced ease he brings a cartridge up
into the breech, thrusts the muzzle into the dogs’ cage … There
is a heavy report; blood and brains splatter the cage.”
 Violence and Animals

• Animal suffering at the hand of the men no matter what

color they are has also been shown in the novel—May it
be the goats that are slaughtered for Petrus’s party or the
common dog.
• The most growth in Lurie’s character takes place while
working at the animal shelter. At the shelter his job is to
get rid of the bodies of the dogs after they have been put to
sleep and this is where he finds his penance. Now “he has
learned…to concentrate all his attention on the animal they
are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty
calling by its proper name: love.”
City vs. Country

• The notion of the country as refuge, moreover, is

decisively challenged in the course of the novel: the crime
that takes place on the farm to which Lurie retreats in
disgrace only plunges him further into that abject state. But
it is not only the binary pair of country and city that is
undermined in the novel: all established oppositions and
boundaries seem to be under threat of collapse, especially
the opposition between stranger and kin, confounded as it
is by the act of rape.
City vs. Country:
The reversal of
margin and center

• The time-honored associations attached to the terms

“country” and “city” are consequently destabilized: the
idea of the country as a place of moral simplicity, from
which a critique of the city may be staged, is rendered
untenable. Nor is it possible any longer to view the city as
the locus of progress and the country as the locus of the
“backward, nostalgic glance” of the pastoral mode.
 Humiliation
and Punishment

• Disgrace is a novel about a person’s humiliation, his

punishment and the human nature and finally the redemption
that he seeks in a country that has been riddled with
problems of racism from a very long time. The picture which
Coetzee offers seems to be very bleak. As Lucy tells Lurie
near the end “Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To
start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but.
With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights,
no dignity … like a dog.” This indeed is quite disturbing.
David Lurie:
Knowledge
& Reputation

• The central character is a confusing person, at once an

intellectual snob who is disrespectful of others and also a
person who commits outrageous mistakes. His story is also
local; he is a white South African male in a world where
such men no longer hold the power they once did.
David Lurie:
Knowledge & Reputation

• He is forced to rethink his entire world at an age when he

believes he is too old to change and, in fact, should have a
right not to. This theme, about the challenges of aging both
on an individual and social level, leads to a line, “No
country, this, for old men,” an ironic reference to the
opening line of the William Butler Yeats’ poem, “Sailing to
Byzantium”.
Solution
at the End

• But the real solution would be the one that Coetzee

presents much earlier in this brilliantly written novel when
a white (Lurie) person and a non-white (Petrus) person are
working together in a drained storage dam in the fields.
There they are together shoveling out the shit as one even
though they may not want to. This picture isn’t in the least
hopeless.
 Solution at the End

• At the end, Disgrace is indeed a pitiless and straight to

the point novel which quite efficiently exposes the basic
state of humanity at the end of twentieth century though
most of it might be applicable even today.