Disgrace
Place on List:
II. Literary Genre: The
Novel
3.
How is political conflict directly represented in novels?
J.M.Coetzee.
*Disgrace.
(1999,
South
Africa)
Key Terms (tags): novel, narrative
prose, english literature,
Supporting References:
- The Politics of Shame and Redemption in JM Coetzee's" Disgrace"
www.jstor.org/stable/4618299
- Betty LaFace. “The African Anti-Eden in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace: Ethnic Identity and Nation Building in South Africa” The Humanities Collection
The International Journal of the Humanities, Volume 5, Issue 7, pp.169-174. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 500.148KB).
Keywords: Africa, Identity, Race,
Nation, Gender, Difference, Literature Studies
An incident of haunting violence and
terror in J. M. Coetxee’s novel Disgrace renders an exacerbated
biblical Fall following the strained relationship between the white
South African Professor David Lurie, a divorced father, and his
fair-skinned daughter Lucy: Lurie fails to protect his daughter, a
lesbian living alone on her remote farm, to prevent her rape and
robbery by local Black thugs, and to keep her landholding from being
confiscated by her polygamous Black caretaker, Petrus. In each
instance, what happens to Lucy has happened to Black South Africans
in the past. I will read the novel as an allegory in which Lucy
represents a South Africa that has been raped and violated physically
and geographically by whites during the Apartheid, and that now in
the new South Africa the same pattern of behavior is being reiterated
by Blacks. The Blacks represent a new leadership (possibly temporary
as the word “caretaker” suggests of Petrus) that simply repeats
the rape and geographical violation of their white predecessors. The
child Lucy carries, another victim in the cycle of racial hatred and
violence, will bear the marks of changes to come in the South African
landscape. Written in deceptively spare prose and with steely
intelligence, Coetzee focuses on the Post-Colonial social and
political tensions between generations, sexes, and races in South
Africa. As I will argue, the appeal of Lurie’s journeys across vast
savannahs and modern cities of new South Africa is the discovery of a
kind of cold and compelling truth akin to a parody of a spiritual
awakening. Lurie, the teacher, represents the white Afrikaner who has
lost his moral authority. He may witness the current abuse but is not
in a position politically or ethically to do anything about it. His
awakening is less a religious epiphany than a sad commentary of the
inhumanity and the perpetual state of disgrace.
- Birch, Dinah. "Coetzee, J. M.." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of Coetzee and less a discussion on the above-cited
text.
“Coetzee,
J. M. (John Maxwell) (1940– ) Novelist and academic,
born in Cape Town and educated at the university there and at the
University of Texas, where he received his doctorate. He has held
academic posts in both the USA and South Africa; in 2006 he took
Australian citizenship, having settled in Adelaide. His
self‐reflexive, allusive, and disorienting fiction problematizes
power relations and language itself. His first book, Dusklands
(1974), contains two linked novellas, one concerning the American
involvement in Vietnam, the other about an 18th‐century Boer
settler. In the Heart of the Country (1977) focuses on the
meditations of an embittered Afrikaner woman. Waiting for the
Barbarians (1980), a powerful allegory of oppression, was
followed by the Booker
Prize‐winning Life and Times of Michael K
(1983), in which a gardener tries to take his ailing mother back to
her home in the country as South Africa is torn by civil war; Foe
(1986) interacts with the world of Robinson
Crusoe; Age of Iron (1990) is a
compelling story of a woman dying from cancer which links her with
the diseased state. The Master of Petersburg (1994) is set
in 1896, and follows the exiled Dostoevsky
back to St Petersburg where he becomes entangled in a web of
intrigue. Disgrace (1999, Booker Prize, the first writer to
win it twice) is the painful story of a middle‐aged professor of
English in post‐apartheid South Africa charged with sexual
harassment who seeks refuge on his daughter's farm in the Eastern
Cape; the reader's expectations are dismantled in an ethically
disorienting situation. Elizabeth Costelloe (2003) is
similarly disconcerting as a narrative becomes a vehicle for lectures
on animal rights. The protagonist of Slow Man (2005), an
elderly Australian amputee who falls in love with his nurse, is
visited by the previous novel's Elizabeth Costelloe. Diary of a
Bad Year (2007) destabilizes boundaries by including the essays
on political themes of an elderly writer who is preoccupied by his
beautiful neighbour. Coetzee has published autobiography, essays,
interviews, and literary criticism. He was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 2003.”
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