Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee

Guys, I'm sorry I didn't post last night; I had an extremely late night/early morning, and not missing flights takes precedence over posting quasi-book reviews.

I very recently read Disgrace, by South African writer J.M. Coetzee., on the recommendation of a friend of mine. J.M. Coetzee is a unique sort of good writer. The landscape of South Africa is definitely very present in his work; certainly, there's probably a point to be made here about the external reflecting the internal. But that's not where I'm going with this post. Instead, for this blog post, I'm going to be thinking about dimensions of power.

David Lurie, Romanticist and romantic, is sort of in the habit of asserting his power. He seduces a young student in one of his classes, luring her (although she's certainly not entirely unwilling, one never gets the impression that she's particularly excited) into a relationship that she ultimately repudiates by striking back; she brings him up on ethics charges, getting him tossed out of the university. This is pretty standard stuff; the politics of their relationship is a give-and-take that ultimately goes poorly for the original taker.

But Lurie doesn't go gently; he refuses to pander to the ethics committee, standing on the principle that no one but he can possibly know whether or not he regrets his assertion of power and masculinity. And that's not an idle characterization: the novel makes it pretty clear that Lurie's real motivation isn't so much a desire for sex with the young lady, but intsead, a desire to prove himself virile and masculine even in the declining years.

Things go south from there. Lurie goes to stay with his daughter,Lucy,  a fiercely independent woman and a lesbian to boot. And out of the confines of his quite modern university, the politics of power are really in plain view. At the climax of the novel, Lurie and his daughter's house is attacked and the poor young woman is raped, which is standardly read as an assertion of power. And it soon becomes clear that the act was at the instigation of her hired help, a black man named Petrus in the post-apartheid era. Petrus' motivations are simple: he wants to take over hte land on which Lucy lives and make it his own, and if that's not possible, he'll settle for having it basically under his control, perhaps by marrying her. These machinations of power are also pretty standard. But they're garish and extreme to us, and to Lurie, who's accustomed to the workings of the more civilized, but no less savage, parts of South Africa.

In some ways, that was really the impact of Disgrace to me. It's far from a one-dimensional novel; I've not even mentioned the Byron storyline, which is quite interesting in and of itself. But when I read Disgrace, I saw parallel worlds coexisting inside one country the savage acts of rape and ritual land-conquer-marriage, and the machinations of the university and the politics of a love affair. That's the South Africa about which J.M. Coetzee writes, and it is a terrifying, beautiful place.

I'd also be amiss if I didn't mention that David Lurie teaches Wordsworth's Prelude, which is a (brilliant) poem I learned about from survey professor extraordinaire Julia Saville, a brilliant lady who did her doctoral work under Coetzee himself. I'm deeply indebted to her for a fantastic introduction to the delights of British literature (which I'm not writing about for a while due to quiz bowl). Thanks, Professor Saville!

And as always, guys, if you want a sweet copy of Disgrace, go here! But I actually have two, so if you're geographically close to me, you can borrow one.

Man, that wasn't about e.e. cummings at all, was it?