10 - Disgrace (1999)

Summary

In a society of masters and slaves, no one is free. The slave is not free, because he is not his own master; the master is not free, because he cannot do without the slave. … At the heart of the unfreedom of the hereditary masters of South Africa is a failure to love.

— J. M. Coetzee, Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech

Disgrace Is Not Just The Most-Discussed Novel in Coetzee’s oeuvre; it is also one of the most widely discussed novels of the late twentieth century. As well as two special issues of journals in 2002, recent years have seen the publication of both a collection of essays dedicated exclusively to the novel and a short introductory monograph. Besides these book-length studies, there are a number of recent books on Coetzee that contain large sections or chapters on Disgrace. In addition, there is a profusion of scholarly articles that foreground a range of critical concerns and discuss these concerns from feminist, intertextual, contextual, postcolonial, and, most insistently, ethical points of view. The ethical frameworks focus, in turn, on the novel’s engagement with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the politics of rape, as well as an intricately interwoven network of ideas around the role played by dogs (or animals more generally), the body, and the sympathetic imagination.

Before negotiating my own path through this abundance of material, let me give a quick reminder of the main events of the novel. Disgrace tells the story of middle-aged David Lurie, a one-time professor of modern languages with expertise in Romantic poetry (notably Wordsworth and Byron), now reduced to teaching Communications 101 to students with whom he, rather tellingly, fails to communicate. Believing himself to have “solved the problem of sex rather well” through regular “ninety-minute session[s]” with Soraya from “Discreet Escorts” (DG, 1–2), Lurie sinks “into a state of disgrace” (DG, 172) when he engages in sexual misconduct with a student, Melanie Isaacs, after losing access to Soraya. Subsequently subjected to a “hearing” (47), Lurie refuses to perform the necessary “spirit of repentance” (58) that would get him off the hook.

Because he does not oblige in delivering the “spectacle” that he, somewhat melodramatically, suggests is required of him — “breast-beating, remorse, tears if possible. A TV show, in fact” (66) — he loses his teaching job.