3 J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
TESSA HADLEY
When Disgrace came out in 1999 it made a stir outside the circle of those who already knew and admired Coetzee’s work. For a while it was urgently talked about, recommended, lent around; passed from hand to hand, mind to mind, it left its trace of a thrill of excitement, disturbance, even danger, whether readers loved or hated it. In itself, that’s nothing very remarkable, plenty of novels have their day in the sun, not all of them endure. But it’s a curiosity for this vogueishness to befall a novelist so determinedly difficult, so uncompromising in not courting the popular kind of success. Coetzee had won amply, by this time, the passionate appreciation of an initiated readership (and, for that matter, prizes too: this was to be his second Booker, his Nobel was to come in 2003). Disgrace, though, seemed to mark a point in his oeuvre when his own pressing preoccupations intersected with a public mood, here in the UK at least (at home in South Africa its reception was more troubled). Something naked in the expression and the material of this novel cuts through all its complexities, reaches out of them to command attention.
It isn’t cheapening that success to suggest that part of what commands attention is the novel’s theme, announced in its first sentence: ‘For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.’ The sex by itself wouldn’t detain us, these days: in that opening what’s intriguing is the unvarnished statement, its tone not yet wholly decipherable, not mystification but not quite dirty joke either, though it’s bleak with the irony that promises humiliations to come. The story of the whole novel, unfolded in just this spirit of forensic, painful precision, is of a man caught in the crisis of his transition from youth into age, agonised by the oncoming loss of his gift of sexual attraction which has been his way of relating to the world. He has to re-make himself as best he can in the light of that change: a light Coetzee holds up unflinchingly in a dark place. David Lurie when we first meet him is an English teacher at a university in Cape Town, passionate about Wordsworth, Byron, Faust, and formed in a tradition of Europeanised high intellectualism; he has mostly to teach Communications Skills. Outside his work, he seems chronically unsocialised, unsociable: his two marriages have failed, there are no friends who figure, his relations with his colleagues are cool at best, his only strong attachment is to his daughter Lucy. Making love to women – and the elusive signification of the word ‘love’ in that context is part of what the novel explores – has been the adventure, the life-source, the joy, of this difficult man otherwise locked away inside his defended privacy, inside his values which may, he is sometimes afraid, have no point of contact with the Africa outside his mind. Is joy over, now that he’s fifty-two?
Inside the language of the novel, the value of the erotic is continually asserted and continually ironised, without any resolution being offered between these two ways of seeing it. Lurie has a brief affair with one of his students, a beautiful girl called Melanie Isaacs; he calls it an ‘affair’, although, as with all the value-words in this writing, we’re made uneasily aware that ‘affair’ doesn’t quite fit what it tries to describe, to circumscribe. It’s quite clear, Lurie knows perfectly well, that Melanie is only ever half consenting, certainly doesn’t return the strength of his feelings. She ‘intoxicates’ him; he’s ‘astonished by the feeling she evokes’; this very power of his response, he thinks, must in some sense authorise his desire, make it a truth that ought to be served: mustn’t it? ‘Strange love! yet from the quiver of Aphrodite, goddess of the foaming waves, no doubt about that’. Lurie more than once suggests it’s sinful to ignore the authority of sex desire; he quotes from Blake (‘sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’). The affair is what precipitates in the external world the ‘disgrace’ of the novel’s title (although the idea of disgrace drags ever deeper as the novel develops): Lurie is brought in front of a tribunal of his peers and, refusing to go through the forms of apology they demand of him, loses his job. (He says, exasperating them, ‘I was not myself. I was no longer a fifty-year-old divorcé at a loose end. I was a servant of Eros.’)
It would have been possible to write a novel in which the actual experience of the ‘affair’ was vindicated against some diminished account of it given afterwards to a tribunal in thrall to a narrowly conceived correctness, but Coetzee hasn’t done that. Leaving Melanie’s flat, Lurie knows it was ‘not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core’; he imagines her washing to cleanse herself of him. Yet the novel doesn’t allow us either to dismiss the importance Lurie claims for his desire. It erupts into the writing as passionate language, transfiguring the grey prose of a diminished daily existence into poetry (‘a last leap of the flame of sense before it goes out’), invoking the great archetypes that haunt his imagination: Aphrodite, Eros, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Byron. The ‘true value’ of what went on between Lurie and the girl is held in the novel between possible readings, it remains equivocal. In the light of the rape that comes later, at the heart of the novel (Lucy, Lurie’s daughter, is raped by intruders), the equivocation becomes even more uncomfortable; we aren’t allowed to elide the two events – one act born out of ‘love’, one out of ‘hate’ – but we are scrupulously reminded of their resemblance to one another.
Love-making is sublime or grotesque, depending on how you look, where you look from: and perhaps what’s splendid in youth becomes grotesque in the same man in his fifties, following the same impulse (at what point exactly, then, do the gods withdraw their sanction from desire?). Lurie’s ex-wife Rosalind thinks it does: ‘Am I allowed to tell you how stupid it looks?’, she says about the trouble he’s got into with Melanie. ‘Do you think she finds it good to watch you in the middle of your …? … You are too old to be meddling with other people’s children.’ Much later, watching Melanie in a play, Lurie has an epiphanic vision of all the women he’s made love to: they form in his mind for a few moments an almost mystical company, and seem to constitute the most meaningful, transfiguring, contact he’s ever had with other lives. He risks again, to himself, a way of describing these relationships that had at the time of his scandal been derided in the newspapers: he imagines that ‘by each of them he was enriched’. The old-fashioned formality of the word is essential: again, at this point, there’s that audacious change in the register of Lurie’s language, towards the archetypal, almost the Petrarchan: ‘like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness’. His consoling vision, however, is cut short when he’s hissed at the next moment, and pelted with screwed up bits of paper, by Melanie’s lover (all we need to know about him is that he’s young, arrogant, aggressive – the perfunctorily given goatee, leather jacket, earring, stand for these). He embarrasses Lurie, forces him to get up and leave the theatre; Lurie’s consoling memory becomes in a different perspective only his absurdity, his comic predicament (‘Find yourself another life, prof, believe me.’). Driving home from the theatre, shaken, Lurie stops and buys the services of a young prostitute, ‘younger even than Melanie’, who’s too drunk or high even to be aware properly who he is or what she’s doing. So much for enrichment (the word flips over into meaning some exchange quite other, brutally transactional).
One of the ways in which the novel startles and grips readers is in these exposing explorations of a male erotic ideal (it’s almost Updike territory, although it would be hard to think of any writer temperamentally and stylistically less like Updike). The Byron-figure is strongly significant in Lurie’s imagination. Lucy teases him for what she calls his determination to be ‘mad bad and dangerous to know’; he is absorbed by the idea of Byron in Italy, involved in the last love affair with Teresa Guiccioli, writing valedictory poems (in his mid thirties!) on the end of his sensual life, his life as a lover of women, and dreaming of a heroic death in Greece. ‘My days are in the yellow leaf; / The flowers and fruits of Love are gone; / The worm, the canker, and the grief / Are mine alone!’ Unmistakea
bly there’s a connection between this Byronic language with its spare symbolising signification, only weakly denoting ‘real’ things, and the way Lurie’s language intensifies, in relation to the erotic subject, opening up onto heavily laden signs – flower, fruit, flame, dove, breast, ravishment – out of the precisely specifying realism that is a more usual register in the novel (they eat, he and Melanie, ‘anchovies on tagliatelle with a mushroom sauce’, they talk of her ‘career plans’ in stagecraft and design). Lurie wants to write something about Byron, but not the kind of critical writing he has done before, in his life as an academic. Characteristically quixotically, he chooses to work out his obsession as an opera, which he knows almost before he begins will never be performed, can’t operate in any public context as a redemption from his disgrace, or recovery of his cultural authority. The idea of the opera, which he first conceives of as describing the lovers trapped poignantly together in Teresa’s husband’s house, evolves into something more absurd and strange, in relation to Lurie’s developing awareness of his own absurd position. The middle-aged Teresa, fat and wheezy, nursing her sick father, yearns for her dead lover, who is reluctant to be dragged back from his non-being among the shades. Her laments are to be accompanied on a child’s toy mandolin.
Byron in the novel stands archetypally for that theme recurrent in European culture from the troubadours onwards: the male realising himself through sexual adventure and pleasure. In this tradition the female is the love object, transfigured through a male fantasising poetic language (for as long as she’s in favour, unattained, or at least not tired of) into transcendent beauty. Disgrace in some sense tests out this old tradition in a new world. Modernity has seen through the machinery of that erotic ideal to its predication upon female subordination, its dependence on a male connoisseurship prone to disallowing any separate female centre of subjectivity. Might we nonetheless, in repudiating the ideal, have too carelessly discounted forms of imagining which were worth keeping open? Wasn’t that tradition, on reconsideration, one way after all of doing honour to women? Or, if not that, then perhaps its forms offered at least intensifications of experience; without those forms, perhaps the language in which we imagine love and sex runs the risk of losing its power to move us and change us out of ourselves, becoming blandly functional and banal. Coetzee does not innocently make Lurie think – for instance – that ‘he does not like women who make no effort to be attractive’, or ‘sapphic love: an excuse for putting on weight’: he knows (and Lurie knows too) that such thoughts are problematic for a liberal modernity. It’s not that in the new world male desire has been made meekly obedient, or safe (Lucy’s rape, at the extreme, is clear enough evidence to the contrary); it’s only that in liberal discourse the male pursuit has become something to dissimulate or apologise for. Defiantly, knowing himself out of joint with the times, Lurie insists upon it; the novel through his insistence tests out the ideal, in its poetry and its absurdity. The idea of testing, of a way of thinking or a man being tested, comes up more than once: when the intruders break in on Lucy’s farm Lurie thinks ‘so it has come, the day of testing’. Postponing sitting down to begin his opera, he dreads ‘the moment when he must face the blank page, strike the first note, see what he is worth’.
Lurie, setting himself these tests, in some sense always fails them. ‘Out of the poets I learned to love,’ his Byron sings, ‘but life, I found, is another story.’ It might be possible to read Lurie as tragic-heroic mind-adventurer, a man born too late, struggling to keep the old cultural values alive in a fallen world; but this version of the story would be open to a hostile scepticism, impatient with the difficulties he brings down on himself, his social ineptitude, his inability to relax, unwind, join in. Who is he, to pronounce on modernity, on Africa, whose only efforts to reach out and establish contact with it are these fumblings with an unwilling girl? A more nuanced and more interesting reading of the Lurie persona is possible if we imagine the author’s attittude towards his character in Disgrace as belonging in a continuum in Coetzee’s oeuvre with Boyhood, whose publication precedes it, and Youth, which comes straight afterwards. Both these other books read as more or less autobiographical (although the use throughout of the third person ‘he’ for the protagonist holds us off from making that identification too straightforwardly); Disgrace certainly isn’t that, we presume that none of the events of the story in any ordinary sense ‘belong’ to Coetzee’s own life. But the voice that Coetzee found for telling his story in Boyhood feels continuous with the narration of Disgrace: its stark sequence of events, its continuous sceptical interrogations, its thin and mostly uncomfortable representation of social interaction, its beautiful private flights of imagination. The adult predicament described in Disgrace could, imaginably even if not ‘really’, have its origins in the early experiences and the temperament defined in those other books. The tone of Coetzee’s treatment of the boy and the young man can help us toward a reading of Lurie in Disgrace which doesn’t have to be entirely earnest about his seriousness; which watches him from an ironising, comical, distance.
Lurie in the opening pages of Disgrace thinks about temperament at length. ‘That is his temperament. His temperament is not going to change, he is too old for that. His temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body.’ To some extent the novel sets about dissolving Lurie’s certainty: elements of what he takes at the beginning to be his temperament – the mocking urbanity; the immunity he imagines for his privacy – will crumble under the assault of events and humiliations, the testing of his disgrace. But a persisting truth of temperament is also something the novel asserts, implicitly against a more optimistic view of character as open to renovation and rehabilitation. Lurie often experiments with self-definition, as a form of self-knowledge: ‘Even when I burn I don’t sing,’ he says. ‘He thinks of himself as obscure and growing obscurer. A figure from the margins of history.’ The word temperament might even be included among the rather old-fashioned terminology – beauty, soul, heart, disgrace – which it is part of the novel’s quest to recuperate, or at least to try out for possible recuperation. What the reader has to judge is what distance there is between Lurie’s temperament – difficult, bookish, furiously intelligent, passionately imaginative, serious, clumsy in intimacy, suspicious, easily hostile – and the author’s own. Is this temperament something Coetzee simply unknowingly inhabits; or is this third person subjective narrative radically unreliable, so that we are meant to read around it, ironising its take on things?
This is where the narrative positioning of the more autobiographical books helps out. In them, the reiterative ‘he’ that begins so many of the sentences draws attention to itself, it’s insistent beyond the usual invisibility of the third person, almost suggesting the fixed forensic scrutiny of a surveillance report, the spy sticking to his subject, reporting every twist and turn of action, awareness, conscience, writing always in the present tense. The see-er who notates perches at a very precise small distance from the do-er who performs: almost, but crucially not quite, as near as makes no difference. The see-er sits on the do-er’s shoulder; or observes, notebook in hand, inside his mind. This gives these two autobiographical books their odd fine distinctive comedy: the adult mind notates the inner life of the boy who is but is not him. The boy’s peculiarity is available to the adult, he can scrutinise it, but he can’t be irresponsibly completely free of it, he has to claim it, own up to it. Or he watches the ‘youth’ at large in London, profoundly lonely, cooking fish fingers in his bedsit, dreaming of impossible women imagined out of novels, painfully incapable of expressing to any of the real girls he persuades into his bed the pent-up longing he has been storing against their arrival. It’s not a comedy in which the narrative securely, comfortably, knows better than the protagonist, or only laughs at him; it’s isn’t an option not to engage with these protagonists as significant agents. In the writing, they are co-extensive with the world, they are our only way into se
eing it; but this doesn’t mean that what they are isn’t consciously included in what we’re made able to see. Temperament is both a given, a perspective the author can’t help – it’s how he is – and something the author is separately able to get behind, achieve a perspective on. He can’t help being himself, but he is also able to define and represent himself; and in fact that effort of self-transcendence, that move a small distance apart from the acting self, is crucial to any attempt at self-knowledge. In an important critical essay on Tolstoy, Rousseau and Dostoevsky, Coetzee has shown himself deeply interested in the problem of self-knowledge in writing: ‘how to know the truth about the self without being self-deceived’.1 He responds in particular to the layerings of acting and consciousness and consciousness-of-acting in Dostoevsky. Perhaps it is partly in response to the problem of inauthenticity-in-confession that he sets out in that essay, that Coetzee has evolved the third-person-at-one-remove sceptical scrutiny that serves his effort to write the truth in Boyhood and Youth (the titles must derive from Tolstoy’s autobiographical writing).
The Good of the Novel Page 6
