John Maxwell CoetzeeDisgrace

John Maxwell Coetzee (born on 9 February 1940) is an author and academic

from South Africa. He is now an Australian citizen and lives in Adelaide, South

Australia. A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Coetzee has won the

Booker Prize twice and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.

His father was an occasional lawyer, government employee and sheep farmer,

and his mother a schoolteacher. The family spoke English at home, but Coetzee spoke

Afrikaans with other relatives. The family were descended from early Dutch settlers

dating to the 17th century. Coetzee also has Polish roots, as his great-grandfather

Baltazar (or Balcer) Dubiel was a Polish immigrant to South Africa.

Coetzee spent most of his early life in Cape Town and in Worcester in Cape

Province (modern-day Western Cape) as recounted in his fictionalized memoir,

Boyhood (1997). The family moved to Worcester when Coetzee was eight after his

father lost his government job due to disagreements over the state's apartheid policy.

Coetzee attended St. Joseph's College, a Catholic school in the Cape Town suburb of

Rondebosch, and later studied mathematics and English at the University of Cape

Town, receiving his Bachelor of Arts with Honours in English in 1960 and his

Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Mathematics in 1961.

Coetzee married Philippa Jubber in 1963 and divorced in 1980. He had a

daughter, Gisela (born 1968), and a son, Nicolas (born 1966), from the marriage.

Nicolas was killed in 1989 at the age of 23 in a car accident.

Disgrace is the story of a South African professor of English who falls in

disgrace.

The novel tells the story of David Lurie, twice-divorced and dissatisfied with

his job as a Communications professor, teaching one specialized class in Romantic

literature at a technical university in Cape Town in post-apartheid South Africa. His

"disgrace" comes when he seduces one of his students and he does nothing to protect

himself from its consequences. Lurie was working on Lord Byron at the time of his

disgrace, and "the irony is that he comes to grief from an escapade that Byron would

have thought distinctly timid." He is dismissed from his teaching position, after which

he takes refuge on his daughter's farm in the Eastern Cape. For a time, his daughter's

influence and natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life.

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But the balance of power in the country is shifting. Shortly after becoming

comfortable with rural life, he is forced to come to terms with the aftermath of an

attack on the farm in which his daughter is raped and impregnated and he is violently

assaulted.

His lessons on Wordsworth and Byron illustrate points that he himself has been

a victim of or guilty of. With his class he studies a poem by Wordsworth called “A

Bare Ridge” he especially focuses on the words “usurp upon” and says that “usurp

upon means to intrude or encroach upon. Usurp, to take over entirely, is the perfective

of 'usurp upon'”, which the reader will notice is what Lurie is doing to Melanie at this

point in the novel.

He knows that he should not be having personal relations with a student and

expects her to not want this relationship with a teacher. He says when he invites her to

lunch, “there is still time for her to tell a lie, wriggle out. But she is too confused and

the moment passes”.

Lucy's response to the rape, which her father finds bewildering, is to seek

refuge in a damaged silence, and then in fatalism. She does not want to press charges,

and refuses to move away from the area, in part because that will seem like a defeat,

and in part because she begins to see the rape as the necessary price for her continued

occupation of the land. The attack is a kind of historical reparation. "What if that is

the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps

that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see

themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here

without paying? Perhaps that is what they are telling themselves." To which Lucy's

father responds: "I am sure they tell themselves many things. It is in their interest to

make up stories that justify them." Yet only a few minutes earlier in the conversation,

David himself had raised the notion that the attack was not personal but historical: "It

was history speaking through them...A history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it

helps. It may have seemed personal, but it wasn't. It came down from the ancestors."

But Lucy seems to share the self-justifications of her attackers, and when she

discovers that she has been made pregnant by the attack she refuses to have an

abortion. On the contrary, she expects to have the child, to raise it, and even to love it

in time. Her father finds this grotesque, and accuses her of trying to "humble herself

before history." He complains to Lucy's friend that "I don't know what the question is

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any more. Between Lucy's generation and mine a curtain seems to have fallen. I didn't

even notice when it fell."

The novel is interestingly divided on this rather shocking idea of rape as

historical reparation, which, on the surface, is insulting both to its victims, who are

seen to deserve it historically, and to its agents, who are no more than historically

determined, and perhaps even racially determined ("It came down from the

ancestors") to keep on exacting it. The possibility that the novel discusses and then

finally proposes this vision has earned Coetzee a certain amount of covert

condemnation.

Disgrace is a mini-opera without music by a writer at the top of his form. Its

bleak vision lingers, shattering any hope of a redemptive state of grace. (Elizabeth

Gleick)

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