J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace
He has no style, he's lost his face...
J. M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for literature 20 years ago in 2003, four years after the publication of his eighth novel, Disgrace. In that same year, he came out with his next book, Elisabeth Costello. Despite what I’d gathered about the reputation of Disgrace before I checked it out of the local library last week, I was not expecting it to be so much in conversation with EC. And that conversation seems to trade largely on animals.
Your host typically doesn’t like to get “personal” on the Silent Friends project, especially since I find the “personal criticism” trend to be quite boring. But in this case, it seems the most fruitful way into this book is to talk about my own relationship with Coetzee, since it is very much entangled with my critical upbringing and grad school career.
Here’s the thing.
For academic philosophers, there are three accomplished writers of literature: Austen, Proust, and Coetzee. I’m serious. They re-read Austen’s six novels every year the way other people reread The Lord of the Rings.
Coetzee’s novel Waiting For the Barbarians was taught to me a couple of times, and Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello were brought up constantly. The latter novel in particular has gotten loads of attention from professional moral and analytical philosophy. I’m most familiar with Stephen Mulhall’s The Wounded Animal.
His novels are quite allegorical—with Barbarians taking place in a nondescript country—and consciously academic, referring to overt references to the fields of philosophy, theology, and literary studies. The scholarliness of these books can reach the pitch of metafictional interventions into the classics, like with Foe, a remake of Robinson Crusoe. His style is what they call “minimalist,” even to the point of brittleness.
Here is a passage from early in Disgrace, for example:
Rain falls all of Tuesday, from heavy clouds blown in over the city from the west. Crossing the lobby of the Communications Building at the end of the day, he spies her at the doorway amid a knot of students waiting for a break in the downpour. He comes up behind her, puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘Wait for me here,’ he says, ‘I’ll give you a ride home.’
[…]
She is wearing a slick yellow raincoat; in the car she lowers the hood. Her face is flushed; he is aware of the rise and fall of her chest. She licks away a drop from her upper lip. A child! he thinks: No more than a child! What am I doing? Yet his heart lurches with desire.
From this you may get a sense of why this novel has a spicy reputation.
Another exceptional thing about Disgrace is that it takes place in Coetzee’s birth country of South Africa (he expatriated to Australia) after apartheid. He’s addressed apartheid society in his own memoir-novels beginning with Childhood; but in general he’s remained aloof in his work from this environment. Such a move in this context invites criticism of consciously writing for the international publishing market rather than address immediate harsh realities.
Disgrace was a super compelling and thoroughly unpleasant read—and not just because it’s about a Romanticist professor in his 50s who starts sleeping with one of his students, gets dismissed, and spends time in the country on his daughter’s small-holdings farm, who is then sexually attacked by strangers. Not even because we experience these events within the self-absorbed and self-pitying world of this out-of-place Don Juan, named David Lurie.
Instead, it was what this novel was ultimately suggesting about humans and animals—though I can’t be super precise; I need to read the text again and revisit the pool of criticism about it, and this was actually the first time I’d read Coetzee in several years.
This is the other main aspect to Coetzee’s appeal to literary studies. Alongside his style of vernacular modernism (Costello’s opening line concerns “the problem of the opening”) is his philosophy of animals. The philosophy of animals seems to be really popular in bourgeois philosophy these days. It develops form the premise that animals have meaningful lives.
Perhaps SF is showing its zoon politikon colors here, but the identity of human and animal consciousness isn’t something I’m very sympathetic to. (But I haven’t really studied it either.)
The titular character of Costello is a famous Australian author-intellectual, invited to give a lecture at a college in Massacheusettes, and makes a challenging argument on animal rights. Her lecture begins with a comparison of cattle herded in the stockyard to the Nazi’s victims herded onto trains; the mechanized genocide of fascism to industrial slaughter and meatpacking. It’s controversial to say the least—a Jewish professor in the narrative refuses to break bread with the visiting scholar.
Costello-slash-Coetzee (for he submitted and delivered this fiction as a lecture at Princeton) not only attacks any fundamental difference between human and animal (like reason, or ethics, or culture) but also dethrones philosophy in favor of literature and poetry. We cannot reason or speculate on a gorilla’s inner world, but perhaps we could imagine our way into it via poetry.
Now what about disgraced Professor Lurie, with his unclean desires, and what he has witnessed (a burglary, rape, and ensuing protection racket) as part of the tapestry of post-apartheid South Africa? The ending of Disgrace (the last 50 pages or so) felt disappointing, not because it was poorly written, but because it seemed to move into the same philosophical territory. Lurie must learn that we are no better than animals; there is something identical to animal violence and social oppression.
Lurie’s daughter Lucy keeps a lot of dogs on the premises—“The more dogs, the more deterrence.” That’s the utilitarian attitude that Lurie is at home in. “As for animals,” he says to Lucy during one discussion, “let us be kind to them. But let us not lose perspective. We are of a different order of creation from animals. Not higher necessarily, just different. So if we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we feel guilty or fear retribution.”
His position transforms when he takes on work euthanizing and incinerating dogs at the local clinic. Are we that different from these dogs, unwanted and “released from life,” especially if we lose our possessions. Shouldn’t we be asking for their forgiveness? And—of course—what is this implying about the situation of Black people in South Africa?
Perhaps a class analysis could straighten all this out. But Coetzee is quite an anti-Marxist.
Coetzee’s latest novel, called The Pole, is coming out later this year.