Unraveling A Historical Moment
ALLEN, BROOKE
Writers & Writing UNRAVELING A HISTORICAL MOMENT By Brooke Allen When J. M. Coetzee's eighth novel, Disgrace (Viking, 220pp., $23.95), was awarded the Booker Prize in Britain, where it was...
...Beautiful, immature Melanie Isaacs is flattered by her professor's attentions but clearly not attracted...
...Yet for the most part Lucy's earthiness, the chosen limitedness of her life, strikes him as distasteful, and he is quietly appalled by her friend Bev Shaw, whom he sees as the typical animal rights bleeding heart, dumpy and scruffy, with a house that smells of cat urine and dog mange...
...With his characteristic genius for the subtle giveaway, Coetzee describes David not as teaching but as "facing" his classes...
...Lucy accepts the fact that Petrus knows and shields one of the rapists—might even have instigated the attack to scare her off the land so that he can buy it...
...no,' he murmurs...
...At last we come to understand why he has harped throughout the novel on his advancing age, and made so much of his unattractive elderly self...
...Coetzee finally succeeds, though, in making us question whether our hardearned pragmatism is really, after all, so very pragmatic...
...Curren, the heroine of Coetzee's 1990 Age of iron, he is fatally implicated in the old regime simply by virtue of having lived through it and gone along with it...
...She is finally willing to become, in fact, an African and a peasant...
...How is a new society to be constructed...
...But of course the problem of sex is never really solved, and when Soraya removes herself from David's orbit he finds himself tempted by what has become, in 1990s South Africa as in 1990s America, taboo: sex with a student...
...In fact he never loved it, even in his youth...
...David's judgment on himself is no less harsh...
...But since this is a realistic novel the reader itches to drag her off her quixotic high horse and make her "see sense"—her father's sense, and the world's...
...Literary critics, like all critics, eventually get jaded, and after 10 years in the business, several years before that as a graduate student and a lifetime as a reader, I must confess I am tired of postmodern verbosity and showmanship...
...You think I ought to be painting still lives (sic) or teaching myself Russian...
...What position should a white who wishes to remain in Africa adopt...
...This is the only life there is...
...David himself clings to the myth, bequeathed by our spiritual heritage, that people possess souls and animals do not...
...Still, in the new world of institutionalized feminism David is in disgrace no matter what justifying spin he puts on the event...
...Better yet, in his view, she should move back to the city...
...He helps Bev put down unwanted dogs in her veterinary clinic and, in an ironic reversal of the old order, giving a hand to Lucy's African neighbor Petrus, an up-and-coming local farmer, with various engineering projects...
...David, being the predictable animal he is, refuses to play along with the degrading scenario demanded by the committee of inquiry as the price for his professional rehabilitation...
...Who is right, David or Lucy...
...You don't approve of friends like Bev and Bill Shaw because they are not going to lead me to a higher life.' '"That's not true, Lucy.' '"But it is true...
...and where has that got him...
...Neither is the example of his own favorite, Lord Byron, whose sexual scandal turned not into disgrace but glory and adulation...
...He spends every Thursday afternoon with a coolly efficient professional "escort" named Soraya...
...The act is "not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless," he acknowledges, "undesired to the core...
...He moves into a flat in Grahamstown, near Lucy, and works fulltime with Bev, taking on the lowly but merciful role of angel of death for the community's unwanted, doomed dogs...
...Lucy's response takes into account the demands of the historical moment and is accepting of its perils...
...Lucy is as different from David as it is possible to be, and the father's love for his daughter combines uneasily with a contempt for her way of life that she does not fail to recognize...
...Lucy is conscious of David's discomfiture, and not afraid to challenge it...
...David and Lucy differ in their ideas about what to do next...
...At odd moments he can take a certain esthetic pleasure in his offspring and her surroundings: "Now here she is, flowered dress, bare feet and all, in a house full of the smell of baking, no longer a child playing at farming but a solid countrywoman, a boervrou...
...Disgrace is unquestionably the best book of the last year, and has made Coetzee worthy of being the only two-time winner in the history of the Booker Prize...
...University officials find out about the incident and press charges of sexual harassment...
...Which we share with animals...
...I think they are rapists first and foremost," she says...
...Once a professor of modern languages and specialist in the Romantic poets, he has been transformed since what he refers to as "the great rationalization" into an adjunct professor of communications...
...Lucy does not deny it...
...Not wanting to be seen skulking around the neighborhood of the university, he decides to pay an extended visit to his daughter Lucy, who farms a small plot of land in the remote Eastern Cape...
...That task will be for Lucy and her generation, if they have the humility to take it on...
...Disgrace is a tricky piece of work that inspires the reader not only to question his or her own long-held beliefs but even to change them...
...David's disgrace turns out to be real, and in the end he accepts it...
...The author, a native of South Africa—the British Empire's renegade colony and the world's problem child—sees the interracial future in his country as a bleak, penitential one...
...neither can the connection between the rape of a woman and that of a country...
...The rape may have been an expression of cultural and historic revenge...
...After a visit to the hospital father and daughter are, at least physically, on the mend...
...The protagonist, David Lurie, is a man with whom many readers over the age of 40 or so will be able to identify only too easily...
...one that deals with a real, desperately important and universal theme...
...He is personally and morally inadequate: "The truth is, he has never had much of an eye for rural life, despite all his reading in Wordsworth...
...He finds his students as ignorant and uninteresting as newly-hatched chicks and teaches to earn a living, not because he loves it...
...David wants her to build a fence, get better watchdogs, get a gun...
...Simply pleading guilty to the charges is not enough...
...He is 52, twice divorced, a scholar with all of a scholar's freaks and foibles...
...But in political terms he is, indeed, old: old and useless...
...To share some of our human privilege with the beasts.' " So David and Lucy muddle along together, a typically incompatible but well-meaning parent-and-child team, and David tries to settle in his temporary home...
...He accepts that too...
...But Lucy believes she must in some sense embrace the danger as the price she has to pay for continuing to live on land that is no longer really hers...
...He will admit guilt, but not grovel and abase himself...
...He has been writing a chamber opera on Byron that weirdly transforms itself from grandiose tragedy to unperformable, grotesque comedy...
...Later they sleep together in his bed...
...That's the example that people like Bev try to set...
...without an unnecessary or unconsidered word...
...You think, because I am your daughter, I ought to be doing something better with my life.' "He is already shaking his head...
...To David all this smacks of Mao's China, with its system of "recantation, self-criticism, public apology," and the reader can hardly help agreeing with him...
...He cannot, he believes, sincerely apologize for his nature, and since he is a scholar of the Romantics, William Blake's injunction to "sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires" is never far from his mind...
...He is also expected to apologize openly and to demonstrate the undemonstrable—that is, the sincerity of his repentance...
...That's the example I try to follow...
...Not much of an eye for anything, except pretty girls...
...It was history speaking through them," David suggests...
...What ajoy it is, then, to find a novel without one shred of stylistic self-indulgence...
...Like Mrs...
...Writers & Writing UNRAVELING A HISTORICAL MOMENT By Brooke Allen When J. M. Coetzee's eighth novel, Disgrace (Viking, 220pp., $23.95), was awarded the Booker Prize in Britain, where it was published before being issued here, the director of the judges' panel, Gerald Kaufman, described it as "an allegory about what is happening to the human race in the postcolonial era...
...History has consigned David to the trash can, and he is now wise enough to accept its judgment...
...She knows that as long as she lives in her house she will have to depend on Petrus' protection and goodwill, and when it transpires that she is pregnant she even considers submitting entirely and becoming one of his wives...
...Fifty-two, after all, is not exactly ancient, and for him to compare himself and Melanie with Cronos and Harmony is carrying self-consciousness a little far...
...The connection between David's milder transgression with Melanie Isaacs and Lucy's rape cannot be escaped...
...Stealing things is just incidental...
...He seduces her on his living room floor, forcing her sweater up to expose her breasts...
...Soon this unlikely scenario is shattered by an act of brutality: Three men force their way into Lucy's house, shoot the dogs, pour methylated spirits over David and set him on fire, gangrape Lucy, and steal all the valuables...
...We would probably be wrong to call it pessimistic, though...
...David "has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well...
...So much for the poets, so much for the dead masters...
...The violation, though, has altered not only Lucy's life but David's as well, cruelly exposing the inadequacy of his worn-out philosophy...
...They are not going to lead me to a higher life and the reason is, there is no higher life...
...Who have not, he must say, guided him well...
...No new order will be forged by the likes of him...
Vol. 82 • December 1999 • No. 15
