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Key quotations used in Lectures (L3 South African Literature) S. Saayman

Lectures 1,2:

Postcolonial Literature, broadly speaking, is writing that has been “affected by the
imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (Ashcroft et al.
The Empire Writes Back, New York : Routledge, 1989, 2)

John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa on 9 February 1940.
Coetzee’s parents shared an Afrikaner ancestry, though English was the language
spoken at home. Coetzee does not consider himself to be an Afrikaner, English being his
first language.

It is important to keep in mind that Coetzee was 8 years old when the Afrikaner-
nationalist National Party (NP) came to power in 1948. He thus grew up in what he
himself refers to as ‘a time of raging Afrikaner nationalism’ (Doubling the Point, 393).

He studied at the University of Cape Town and interestingly completed an Honours

degree in English (1960) and another Honours degree in mathematics (1961). Between
1962 and 1965 he worked as a computer programmer in England.

He subsequently did a PhD in English, philology and linguistics, and German languages
at the University of Texas. He wrote his dissertation on style in the early fiction of
Samuel Beckett.

He taught at the State University of New York in Buffalo, not wanting to return to South
Africa. He did return in 1972 and started teaching at the University of Cape Town – he
taught there until 2000.

In 2002 Coetzee and his partner emigrated to Australia where Coetzee holds an
honorary research position at the University of Adelaide. In March 2006 he became an
Australian citizen.

He became the first writer to win the Booker Prize twice, in 1983 and 1999. In 2003,
Coetzee was awarded Nobel Prize for Literature.

J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) has […], since its first publication, has become both one
of the most widely read novels by a South African-born author, and one of the late
twentieth century’s most critically acclaimed novels in any language. Only apparently
a straightforward realist narrative, its formal complexity and depth of symbolic
plotting offers a multi-layered engagement with the politics of writing itself. It is also
a rigorous philosophical working out of some compelling ideas about ethics,
responsibility and identity in postcolonial society. Some read it as a bleak account of
post-Apartheid South Africa, while for others it is about gender relations and
exploitation. For others still, it is a book about the relationship between humans and
animals. (VAN DER VLIES, Andrew, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, London and New York:
Continuum, 2010, preface)
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It is naive to think that writing is a simple two-stage process: first you decide what
you want to say, then you say it. On the contrary, as all of us know, you write because
you do not know what you want to say. In fact, it sometimes constructs what you
want or wanted to say. What it reveals (or asserts) may be quite different from what
you thought (or half-thought) you wanted to say in the first place. That is the sense in
which one can say that writing writes us. (Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 18)

“(…) Coetzee, through his critical essays and his fiction, actively challenges, and
contributes to politico-philosophical thinking in the fields of language, ethics, and
aesthetics.” (Clarkson, preface)

“Throughout his work, both fictional and non-fictional, Coetzee develops what one
might call a philosophy of writing.” (Clarkson, 2)

Lectures 3,4:

South African literature is a literature in bondage, as it reveals in even its highest

moments, shot through as they are with feelings of homelessness and yearnings for a
nameless liberation. It is a less than fully human literature, unnaturally preoccupied
with power and the torsions of power, unable to move away from elementary
relations of contestation, domination, and subjugation to the vast and complex human
world that lies beyond them. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect
people to write from prison. (Coetzee in Doubling the Point, 98)

Andrew van der Vlies:

A significant context for any discussion of confession in South Africa in the late 1990s
is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), constituted by law and chaired by
Nobel Peace Laureate and noted human rights advocate Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It
sought, during the middle and late 1990s, to uncover the thousands of stories of
human rights abuses committed under the Apartheid regime, and to consider
amnesty applications brought by perpetrators. It was a requirement for amnesty that
perpetrators give a full and frank account of what they had done, and that they prove
a political motive for their actions. Although there was an unspoken expectation that
an act of repentance would be performed, perpetrators did not, strictly speaking,
have to apologize or prove contrition. Rather, amnesty was construed as necessary
for reconciliation, although the TRC’s critics would claim in due course that justice
was made subordinate to reconciliation in the process.

Despite its requirements for a kind of confession that was not delivered in pursuit of
absolution or forgiveness endorsed in religious terms, that the TRC was chaired by a
cleric gave the whole enterprise a religious air. Notice how the disciplinary hearing in
Ch 6 of Disgrace operates in a comparable manner. It is chaired by a professor of
Religious Studies, Manas Mathabane (p. 47). However, David Lurie’s response to
questioning might be read as an implied critique of the ambiguities attendant on the
TRC’s process. He refuses to offer a confession on the terms demanded by the more
hostile members of the panel, especially Farodia Rassool (p.52). She insists that Lurie
acknowledge a distinction between pleading guilty to an offence, which he does, and
demonstrating contrition, which he refuses to do. (Van der Vlies 66)
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Farodia Rassool […] charges [Lurie] with ignoring ‘the long history of exploitation’ in
which his actions participate (p. 53), and insists that ‘the wider community’ has an
interest in his contrition (p. 50). Both statements, from the mouth of a woman of
colour (….), encode an accusation that Lurie is not only guilty of serious professional
misconduct (in sleeping with a student, in falsifying her attendance and academic
record), but, in the broader South African context, that he is also guilty of
perpetrating – and perpetuating – white-on-black exploitation. (Van der Vlies 25)

The Pastoral:

he is a “man of the city” (p. 65)

From the shade of the stoep Lucy emerges into the sunlight. For a moment he does
not recognize her. A year has passed, and she has put on weight. Her hips and breasts
are now (he searches for the best word) ample. Comfortably barefoot, she comes to
greet him, holding her arms wide, embracing him, kissing him on the cheek. (59)

The house, which is large, dark, and even at midday, chilly, dates from the time of
large families, of guests by the wagonful. Six years ago Lucy moved in as a member
of a commune, a tribe of young people who peddled leather goods and sunbaked
pottery in Grahamstown and, in between stands of mealies, grew dagga. When the
commune broke up, the rump moving on to New Bethesda, Lucy stayed behind on the
small holding with her friend Helen. She had fallen in love with the place, she said;
she wanted to farm it properly. He helped her buy it. Now here she is, flowered dress,
bare feet and all, in a house full of the smell of baking, no longer a child playing at
farming but a solid countrywoman, a boervrou. (60)

He strolls with her past the mud-walled dam, where a family of ducks coasts serenely,
past the beehives, and through the garden: flowerbeds and winter vegetables –
cauliflowers, potatoes, beetroot, chard, onions. They visit the pump and storage dam
on the edge of the property. Rains for the past two years have been good, the water
table has risen.
She talks easily about these matters. A frontier farmer of the new breed. In
the old days, cattle and maize. Today, dogs and daffodils. The more things change, the
more they remain the same. History repeating itself, though in a more modest vein.
Perhaps history has learned a lesson.
They walk back along the irrigation furrow. Lucy’s bare toes grip the red
earth, leaving clear prints. A solid woman, embedded in her new life. Good! It this is to
be what he leaves behind – this daughter, this woman – then he does not have to be
ashamed. (62)

Lectures 5,6:

Lucy’s pastoral is that of a return to the status of a peasant working the land. She refuses
the role of a hereditary master directing the labour of others.
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We have referred to the novel’s limited third-person present-tense narration and its
focalisation through David Lurie.

The novel’s generic instability: “the narrative tries out a number of genres in order to
tell David Lurie’s story – or, rather, the story of David Lurie, as seen through his eyes.”
(Van der Vlies 62)

If Disgrace is a campus novel in the first part, it moves into the mode of the pastoral
(perhaps more strictly anti-pastoral) in the second. The novel seriously investigates the
forms pertinent to the contemporary, post-apartheid South Africa, to narratives of
trauma, alterity, gender violence and dispossession more broadly.

Marais, Mike, “Reading against Race”: J. M Coetzee’s Disgrace, Justin Cartwright’s White
Lightning and Ivan Vladislavic’s The Restless Supermarket, Journal of Literary Studies,
Vol. 19, Issue 3-4, 2003 :

“It is not incidental that Coetzee’s novel is largely set on a farm or smallholding. Indeed,
Coetzee has written extensively on the way in which the early South African plaasroman,
or farm novel, evinces an anxiety about the rights of white ownership in the colonial
context – an anxiety which is evident in the excision of the “curse” of black labour from
the pastoral idyll that is conventionally invoked by texts in this genre. This “silence
about the place of black labour,” Coetzee suggests, “represents a failure of imagination
before the problem of how to integrate the dispossessed black man into the idyll”
(Coetzee, White Writing, New Haven: Radix, p. 71). As a rule, those of Coetzee’s novels
that call to mind the plaasroman – In the Heart of the Country (1978) and Life & Times of
Michael K. (1983), for example – reinscribe the place of black labour in the portrayal of
relations on the farm.”

Lucy describes her relationship with Petrus in terms that are nominally divested of
power, that is, as her “assistant” and “co-proprietor” (p. 62).

Later, she says that she is unable to “order Petrus about” because [h]e is his own master”
(p. 114).

“old Kaffraria” (p. 61)

“[a] frontier farmer of the new breed” (p. 62)

The narrative is read from Lurie’s perspective and he is unreliable. Lurie’s

understanding or reading of Lucy’s reaction to her rape is a “misreading” according to
her. Lucy remains silent and the reader has to other insight, has nothing to go on.

“What happens to Lucy in the Eastern Cape is not the first instance of sexual exploitation
in the novel, although it is certainly the most violent.” (Van der Vlies 22)

“It is only after his daughter Lucy’s rape, and in the face of her insistence on taking
ownership of her own story (on not being spoken for, as the focalization has made clear
he attempts to do for Soraya and Melanie), that he begins to realize that his actions may
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exist on a continuum with those of his daughter’s attackers. Lucy asks him if having sex
with “someone strange” is “a bit like killing” (p. 158); we might recall the sense Lurie has
that it is as if something in Melanie dies after the second, undesired, act of intercourse.
Lucy also suggest, in a moment of anger and frustration, that her father, as a man, “ought
to know” with what hatred and violence the sex act is able to be carried out (158).”(Van
der Vlies 25-26)

“After Lucy’s rape, David, outraged at being considered an outsider by his daughter and
by Bev Shaw, wonders whether they think no man capable of empathizing with a
woman’s experience of sexual violation (pp. 140-1). He asks Lucy whether she wishes to
make him think of “what women undergo at the hands of men” (p. 111). In fact, from his
arrival on his daughter’s smallholding in the Eastern Cape in Chapter 7, Lucy is shown to
encourage David to confront his own solipsism, self-justifications, excuses and
delusions.” (Van der Vlies 26-27)

Bibliography :

ASHCROFT et al. The Empire Writes Back, New York : Routledge, 1989

ATTWELL, David, ed., Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992

CLARKSON, Carrol, J.M. Coetzee: Counterworks, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan 2013

MARAIS, Mike, “Reading against Race”: J. M Coetzee’s Disgrace, Justin Cartwright’s White
Lightning and Ivan Vladislavic’s The Restless Supermarket, Journal of Literary Studies,
Vol. 19, Issue 3-4, 2003

VAN DER VLIES, Andrew, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, London and New York: Continuum,
2010