NAME: Anonymous

TUTOR: EAH COMMENTS:

DATE: 12 MARCH 2011

By closely analysing your chosen passage, consider the ways in which Coetzee presents and explores the theme of lives, rights and the suffering of others Throughout Disgrace, Coetzee addresses the moral ambiguity in ones right to determine the lives of others through the conicted ethical alignment of David Lurie. Employing the dogs as a symbol of others suffering, the passage follows David as he explores the signicance of his role in lightening the burden of the unwanted at the Animal Welfare Clinic in a new South Africa1 . However, as Coetzees adoption of free-indirect style introduces partialities into the narrative, characteristics of David as an unreliable narrator undermine the authenticity of his claim to see the lives, rights and the suffering of others as more than merely blank abstraction[s]. The signicance of David Lurie is characterised implicitly in the narrative, providing the reader with only a partial depiction of events. Coetzees use of free indirect style2 , exposes the reader to a subjective3 illustration of Davids experiences, imposing aspects of his character upon our reading of the text. Without an active narrator to mediate between subjective interpretation and objective

The new South Africa refers to post-1993 South Africa after the collapse of the Apartheid regime. The new South Africa therefore represents a time of sociopolitical and moral realignment, with black South Africans re-enfranchised and now socially equal. The process of land restitution, an attempt to reintegrate black communities into society, is a feature of post-Apartheid policy foremost relevant to Disgrace, with Petrus acquiring land from Lucy. Residual racial divides nevertheless underly modern South Africa, with David arguably disdainful of this New Age mumbo jumbo.
2 Free

indirect style refers to a style of third-person narration characterised by its integration of direct speech without the preluding inquit of he said or she thought. Coetzees adoption of this narrative mode illustrates the novels tendency towards partiality, with Davids interjection into the narrative portraying a subjective account of events.
3

Subjectivity, in contrast with objective narration, refers to an absence of intrinsic truth in the narrative. While David is not necessarily intentionally untruthful in his account, the readers limitation to his perspective without access to information unknown to him questions his depiction of events in Disgrace. 1

truth, features of Davids character often spill over into the narrative. Focalization4 through the perspective of David Lurie therefore limits Coetzees portrayal of the novels thematic concerns, with Coetzee engaging with the question of lives, rights and the suffering of others directly through Davids inherent biases and character aws. Indeed, a foremost feature of David character, a tendency to embellish his experiences, the consequence of his occupation as a professor of romantic poetry, is evident in the narratives depiction of hyperbole as objective truth. Such ambiguity presents in David describing his role as a murderer and the killing session[s] that take place at the Animal Welfare Clinic, with the absence of narrative renement presenting objectively mundane happenings with excessive grandiosity. Distorted by his own self-deception, the authenticity of Davids transition, from callous obstinacy to affectionate dog-man, is called into question. Coetzees construction of an emotional transition, akin to the epiphanic literature of the Romantics 5, acts as a narrative device exploring the capacity for people to truly revise their moral perspective regarding the lives and suffering of others. To understand the signicance of Davids moral realignment, we must rst deconstruct his initial idea of the world, as to determine his emotional progression. An emotional disengagement underpins Davids character, with him failing to recognise suffering on an empathetic level; he tries not to sentimentalize. Instead suffering is seen as comparable to the problem of sex, an abstraction that can be, to his mind, solved. This refusal to engage with the realities of suffering, a concept vividly illustrated in the passages description of women and children waiting to pick through the bags of hospital waste, demonstrates an element of callousness in Davids character while illuminating his reliance on abstraction as a means of avoiding a show of compassion. An inability to empathise could be seen in Davids persistent misreading of social circumstance, adopting a casual tone in describing his trip to the furnace, a description in contrast with his later claim that it would not be enough to drop off the bags [...] and drive away. However, Davids claim that until now he has been more or less indifferent to animals, understatement considering his misjudged jesting that I eat them, so I suppose I must like them, some part of them, is demonstrative of an unwillingness to empathise rather than inability. A true emotional transition therefore, would see David recognising his own tendency towards abstraction as inadequate, as he does in acknowledging the irony in describing the emotive concept of Lsung with an appropriately blank abstraction, considering its relation to Endlsung, the Final Solution6. A failure to empathise is ironically described by David as a gift, the ability for one to grow carapaces over their souls. Surprisingly David claims not to have the gift of hardness, a claim in contention with prior characterisations of callousness. This refusal to acknowledge his emotional disengagement again demonstrates the narratives unreliabilities while highlighting Davids growing admiration for Bev Shaw. Initially disdainful of her dishevelled appearance and absence of professional ambition, Davids implicit recognition of Bev as gifted illustrates genuine progress in David acceptance of others lives. Undermining her signicance as a force for actual good, however, David limits her signicance by abstracting her role into religious allusion, He does not

Gerard Genettes conception of focalisation refers to the perspective through which the narrative is presented. As a subjective narrative, Davids narration in Disgrace would be described as internally focalised.
5

Romantic Literature refers to the literary works of the Romantic Era, a period characterised by its abandonment of sociopolitical beliefs of the Enlightenment. Davids concern for Romanticism extends from his occupation as a Professor of Romantic Literature and helps explain his tendency to abstract and overstate his narration.
6

Davids failure to appropriately assess his social situation and engage with suffering at an empathetic level is demonstrated in his loose reference to the suffering of the Holocaust. A symbol of 20th century suffering, the emotive implications of the Holocaust, the genocide of between 11 million and 17 million Europeans, should be considered incomparably distinct from relative mundanity of the actions at the Animal Welfare Centre. 2

dismiss the possibility that at the deepest level Bev Shaw may be not a liberating angel but a devil. In challenging the role of the Animal Welfare Centre as fundamentally good, Coetzee raises the question of morality regarding the right to determine the lives of others. The symbol of the incinerator as an embodiment of moral interventionism enables Coetzee to explore the ethical principals of determining the lives of others, specically the utilitarian notion of killing as merely a means to an end. The mechanised presentation of the incinerator, where David cranks the mechanism [...], pulls the leaver [...] and cranks it back, conicts with Davids depiction of the incinerator with religious signicance, on the seventh day it rests. In contrast with the grace of God, a notion foremost relevant in its relation to the novels title, the incinerator symbolises the absent of choice, a predetermined means of lighten[ing] the burden, because we are too menny.7 . Signicantly David objects to this decadence, addressing prior introspection regarding his idea of the world, concluding in a belief in a world in which men have no right to use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing. Coetzees portrayal of David emotional transition, ultimately accepting the lives, rights and the suffering of others as more than conceptual abstractions is only possible through his social degradation. Commenting on the notion of a universal suffering, David is like a dog8 , socially disposed of, a harijan9, just as the dogs can neither be sold nor eaten. Through Davids experiences, Coetzee explores the moral implications of ones actions in determining the lives of others, resolving in the importance of accepting alternative concerns and precedences.

A quotation from Thomas Hardys Jude the Obscure, Coetzee raises the notion of utilitarian sacrice. The process of land restitution and the losses of a landed white minority to ensure the welfare of the social majority alluded to in Petrus social ascension in the context of Lucys exploit and loss, left with no cards, no weapons, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity. These social sacrices are comparable to the sacrices of Little Father Time, who kills himself and his siblings in an effort to ease their burden on the family.
8

Coetzee refers to Davids social degradation with a reference to Franz Kafkas The Trial at the end of Chapter 22, alluding to Davids occupational disgrace with far wider implications. The conclusion of the novel, Joseph Ks execution, is described to be Like a dog[s], a quotation referenced by David to describe his personal suffering and the right he was denied to secular remorse by the university in the same way K. is denied a just court.
9

The Harijans, a term popularised by Gandhi, denotes the lowest class of people under the traditional Indian caste system of social hierarchy. Self-designated as the Dalit people, they were pejoratively described by many Indians as the untouchables, a denotation deemed unacceptable by Gandhi on moral grounds. Literally translated as child of god, it was believed this renaming would limit the continued ostracising of the Dalit people. 3