WICKES
11-01-2013, 04:31 PM
SPOILER ALERT
Disgrace is set in South Africa as the apartheid system is being dismantled. The central characters are David Lurie, a fifty two year old white University lecturer who specializes in Byron, and his daughter Lucy. Lurie is divorced and reasonably content with his life, but an affair with one of his teenage students leads to his resignation and he leaves the city to stay with his daughter, who lives alone on a farm. Their relationship is clearly poor (she never calls him dad) and they have little in common, but he come to like the country life, helps her out at the market, and volunteers to work in a shabby little vets.
Then the central horror of the novel occurs. Three Africans appear at the farm, one of them a boy. They beat David, pour flammable liquid on him, set him alight and then gang rape Lucy. Later the boy appears at a party held by Petrus, Lucy's African neighbour. Petrus acknowledges the rape was 'unfortunate', but offers to marry Lucy and raise the child she is now carrying until the boy is old enough to marry her as well. David is appalled and bewildered by these events and suspects that Petrus has arranged the whole thing so as to get his hands on Lucy's property. Lucy, seeking to atone for 'white guilt', accepts everything that happens: she keeps the baby, agrees to marry Petrus and even criticizes her father when he beats the young boy, whom he finds peering in Lucy's window. Eventually Lurie does adjust himself. He leaves Lucy's house when she hints that it would be best, and hires a grotty room in a boarding house. He continues his work at the vets and grows to feel a strange solidarity with the stray dogs he helps to put down.
This is a beautifully written, extraordinarily realistic novel about an unlikeable and yet entirely believable middle aged man who is gradually broken down to nothing, at which point, like a character in Greek tragedy, he finds a sort of wisdom. The accusations of racism levelled at Coetzee are idiotic (they have been fuelled by the fact that he left South Africa and is now an Australian citizen). South Africa does have a rape problem and many white women were attacked after apartheid ended (including the sister of a south African man I work with). Anyway, I'm not really interested in all that.
This is a true 'tragedy', but in the traditional meaning of that word. As I understand it, Greek tragedy is essentially concerned with 'wisdom achieved through suffering'. Lurie loses everything: his career, his daughter, his creative ambitions (he wanted to write an Opera based on the life of Byron). But by the end he's found a peace of sorts. He spends almost all his time at the vets, sitting about in the scruffy yard out back, feeding the dogs, exercising them and each week helping the vet put them down, zip them up in body bags and drive them to the crematorium. In facing and living through the worst life can inflict he comes to feel a new sympathy and empathy for the "suffering beasts of Africa" and to see himself as just another animal in pain. His pity for the endless stream of unwanted, abused dogs who pass through the vets on their way to the furnace lifts him out of himself. He no longer has any ambitions or hopes, but, oddly, in this broken, humbled state there is peace. It's a dark, painful, brutal novel, but not a depressing one.
Disgrace is set in South Africa as the apartheid system is being dismantled. The central characters are David Lurie, a fifty two year old white University lecturer who specializes in Byron, and his daughter Lucy. Lurie is divorced and reasonably content with his life, but an affair with one of his teenage students leads to his resignation and he leaves the city to stay with his daughter, who lives alone on a farm. Their relationship is clearly poor (she never calls him dad) and they have little in common, but he come to like the country life, helps her out at the market, and volunteers to work in a shabby little vets.
Then the central horror of the novel occurs. Three Africans appear at the farm, one of them a boy. They beat David, pour flammable liquid on him, set him alight and then gang rape Lucy. Later the boy appears at a party held by Petrus, Lucy's African neighbour. Petrus acknowledges the rape was 'unfortunate', but offers to marry Lucy and raise the child she is now carrying until the boy is old enough to marry her as well. David is appalled and bewildered by these events and suspects that Petrus has arranged the whole thing so as to get his hands on Lucy's property. Lucy, seeking to atone for 'white guilt', accepts everything that happens: she keeps the baby, agrees to marry Petrus and even criticizes her father when he beats the young boy, whom he finds peering in Lucy's window. Eventually Lurie does adjust himself. He leaves Lucy's house when she hints that it would be best, and hires a grotty room in a boarding house. He continues his work at the vets and grows to feel a strange solidarity with the stray dogs he helps to put down.
This is a beautifully written, extraordinarily realistic novel about an unlikeable and yet entirely believable middle aged man who is gradually broken down to nothing, at which point, like a character in Greek tragedy, he finds a sort of wisdom. The accusations of racism levelled at Coetzee are idiotic (they have been fuelled by the fact that he left South Africa and is now an Australian citizen). South Africa does have a rape problem and many white women were attacked after apartheid ended (including the sister of a south African man I work with). Anyway, I'm not really interested in all that.
This is a true 'tragedy', but in the traditional meaning of that word. As I understand it, Greek tragedy is essentially concerned with 'wisdom achieved through suffering'. Lurie loses everything: his career, his daughter, his creative ambitions (he wanted to write an Opera based on the life of Byron). But by the end he's found a peace of sorts. He spends almost all his time at the vets, sitting about in the scruffy yard out back, feeding the dogs, exercising them and each week helping the vet put them down, zip them up in body bags and drive them to the crematorium. In facing and living through the worst life can inflict he comes to feel a new sympathy and empathy for the "suffering beasts of Africa" and to see himself as just another animal in pain. His pity for the endless stream of unwanted, abused dogs who pass through the vets on their way to the furnace lifts him out of himself. He no longer has any ambitions or hopes, but, oddly, in this broken, humbled state there is peace. It's a dark, painful, brutal novel, but not a depressing one.