Continuing with answers to the prerequisite questions about Disgrace, a couple on Lurie.

Question

• How are we to treat Lurie’s opera?

Short answer: As an aesthetic failure, thus as non-redemptive.

It’s tempting, I think, to see the opera first as an opportunity for social rehabilitation—which is Lurie’s own early hope for it, though never his primary motivation—and second as a type of compensation for his sins. “It would have been nice,” he thinks, “to be returned triumphant to society as the author of an eccentric little chamber opera. But that will not be” (214). Despite his resignation on this point, he continues to hope (and this is the basis of the second reading, of the opera as compensation) that the work will contain “a single note of immortal longing” (214), but has given up on recognizing such a note himself (leaving the question instead to “history”). Really, though, Lurie has already abandoned any hope concerning the piece’s value:

The truth is that Byron in Italy is going nowhere. There is no action, no development, just a long, halting cantilena hurled by Teresa into the empty air, punctuated now and then with groans and sighs from Byron offstage. … It has become the kind of work a sleepwalker might write.” (214)

We needn’t take Lurie’s word for it, of course, but we don’t have much else to go on and there’s no obvious reason to believe that he’s underestimating his own work’s merit. In light of the quotes above, the burden of proof should certainly lie with anyone who wants to read the work as redemptive, and I’ve not yet seen a compelling case for such a position. Still, there are a handful of readers who disagree to at least some extent: There’s Anker in the MFS article, for axample, and Derek Attridge’s chapter on Disgrace in J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (see p. 174ff).

This matters, one way or the other, because it bears on the issue of redemption or reconciliation in the novel, hence also on any political reading linked to either contemporary South Africa or post-exploitative situations. Art as redemption or expiation is an old, old theme; if Coetzee’s point is something along those lines, the novel is, as far as I’m concerned, seriously diminished. Happily, I don’t see any reason to read it that way, and plenty of textual evidence on the other side. Redemptive art is a rejected alternative in the novel, not its proposed solution to the problem of guilt and atonement.

Question

• Why does Lurie sleep with Bev, and she with him?

Short answer: From a combination of compassion and desire, the precise amalgam of which remains uncertain.

This is trickier than it seems, though I go back on forth on how important it might be. As usual, we’re limited by Coetzee’s focalization of the narrative through Lurie alone. First, we should note in passing that we know for certain of only one time that they sleep together (the first, pp. 148-50); later we are told that although they “lie in each other’s arms” after “the business of dog-killing is over for the day,” they have “not made love; they have in effect ceased to pretend that that is what they do together” (161-62). It’s hard to gauge how much time has passed since their first encounter twelve pages earlier; enough that they can have “long since” ceased to pretend. In any case, we’re not privy to any further details of their affair, if that’s the right word for it.

As for the whys and wherefores of it, we can choose to believe Lurie’s explanation of Bev’s role, that she has acted so that “he, David Lurie, has been succoured, as a man is succoured by a woman; her fiend Lucy Lurie has been helped with a difficult visit” (150). This interpretation, that Bev is largely free of desire and principally other-directed in the affair, isn’t entirely implausible. Bev is an intensely ethical figure, almost sainted in the novel (unless her acts of euthanasia are somehow undermined; more on this later in answer to question six), so it wouldn’t be a stretch to see her as similarly directed with respect to Lurie (who has, after the attack, presumably lost most of whatever physical charms he once had, further reinforcing his status as an object of pity). At the same time, though, there are plenty of reasons to doubt the accuracy of Lurie’s assessments concerning other people in general and women in particular. Even if he’s right that one of the reasons she sleeps with him is a keenly developed sense of altruism, that judgment would be of a piece with his generally egocentrtic mode of explaining things. So we should probably keep open the possibility that Bev has her own reasons and desires (to which we are not directly privy), rather than taking the affair entirely as evidence of her selflessness.

As for Lurie, the proffered explanation seems likewise to fall between desire and something like compassion. On one hand, it may simply be the case that he will sleep with more or less anyone (there have been hundreds, he says, over the years [192]), Bev merely serving as an illustration of exactly how far he has fallen from “the sweet young flesh of Melanie Isaacs,” of “what [he] will have to get used to” (150). But there’s at least a little more to it than that; Lurie is aware, when he explains Bev’s actions to himself, that her self-image is bound up with her ability to provide succor, hence that it is important that he “does his duty. Without passion but without distaste either. So that in the end Bev Shaw can feel pleased with herself” (150). This may not be much as other-directed ethics go, but it’s not nothing.

So Bev begins the affair from generosity and perhaps a bit of pity, mixed with some presumptive degree of desire, while Lurie is motivated by a baseline desire and a species of second-order generosity. Fair enough, if unexceptional. Why does this matter? A couple of reasons. For one, the affair might in a pinch serve as a mode of redemption for Lurie, particularly insofar as it transcends physical desire (the proximate cause of his initial disgrace). I find this option unconvincing, since it both oversimplifies the affair itself and implies a monastic morality, in effect turning the book into an object lesson in the evils of the flesh. Despite the novel’s obvious interest in the problems of aging and its effects on the body, there’s no generalized distaste for sexuality in Disgrace (nor elsewhere in Coetzee’s writing), and it strikes me as a serious error to introduce one here. More importantly, Bev’s motivations are of interest insofar as they are necessarily related to her euthanasia work, which is likewise presented as an act of generosity. Are these instances of the same impulse in her? How does the answer to that question shape our reading of her work with the dogs, and of the role of dogs generally in the novel? See the answer to the next questions for some thoughts.

Here’s the first of my answers to the questions about Disgrace raised in this post. The questions were posed in arbitrary order, but the answers try to work forward in some semi-logical way, hence they don’t follow the original order.

Question

• Why does Lurie give up his job by refusing to defend himself before the inquiry?

Short answer: Because he doesn’t fear the consequences of doing so.

This question is leadingly posed; it might instead have read “Is Lurie mistreated by the university’s commission of inquiry?”

There’s not a lot of critical consensus on this point (in either version), and it’s an important one. If you think that Lurie is mistreated (see Anker in MFS, for example), then you have two options in reply to the question of why he doesn’t do more to defend himself. On one hand, you might deny that he fails to offer a vigorous defense, which means that you’d need to take seriously both his claims about the “rights of desire” and the perceived adequacy of that defense. You would, in other words, need to take Lurie at his word, to treat him as straightforwardly sincere (and as having badly miscalculated the effect of his testimony). I know of no critic who has espoused exactly this position in print, though it is not entirely unsupported in the text (Rosalind, for instance, imputes it to Lurie, and he sometimes—but not often—sounds like he takes it seriously himself).

On the other hand, you might instead see him as a kind of martyr, one who is unwilling to offer an insincere confession or apology even when he knows that his (honestly given) defense will not save him from punishment. This is Anker’s position, which she uses to read the novel as a critique of the inquiry’s (and by proxy the TRC’s) human rights discourse. It’s not wholly implausible (that’s as positive as I can be about it), but notice that it almost certainly commits you to seeing Lurie as the aggrieved party in the aftermath of his affair with Melanie, and hence as its true, noble victim, one unwilling to compromise his principles for politically motivated expediency. This is the basis of many readings of the novel that find its politics objectionable (e.g., Roos’ review in the Cape Argus), primarily because it is taken to suggest that, like Lurie, whites have paid too great a personal and political price in postapartheid South Africa, that they suffer out of proportion to their crimes. (This is a position that also depends, clearly, on additional evidence, mostly in connection with Lucy’s rape; more on this when I come to later questions.)

[Incidentally, the reader will also need to decide, in any case, what offense the inquiry is attempting to punish. Is it Lurie’s rape of Melanie, or merely the fact of their affair? For reasons I laid out in this post, I think it’s unlikely that the formal charges against Lurie include rape. But I also think it’s proper for the reader to understand the inquiry as addressing the sum of Lurie’s transgressions, rape included; if you want to argue that Lurie is wronged, you need to claim that his punishment is excessive relative to all the facts we readers know, not solely those contained in Melanie’s statement (which is withheld from the reader entirely). Ditto, of course, Lucy’s incomplete police report, on which more in a later post.]

If we answer the implied “Is Lurie wronged?” question in the negative, we likewise have two potential explanations of his meager defense. Well, OK, two and a half: The “half” is a rejection of the premise identical to the one above, i.e., the claim that Lurie does offer what he seriously considers to be an effective defense, but that he is simply (and badly) mistaken in this judgment. Again, I find little textual evidence in favor of this position. More plausible are two other readings: (1) That he recognizes the justice of his relatively severe punishment and therefore refuses to shirk it by defending himself more effectively, or (2) That he does not consider the punishment on offer particularly severe, and that he is therefore unwilling to make even relatively small sacrifices to avoid it.

The first case, I think, credits Lurie with entirely too developed a sense of justice and personal culpability at too early a point in the text. It’s an open question, it seems to me—or at least a very difficult and important one—whether or not he has by the end of the novel achieved anything like this level of ethical awareness. But while he’s not blind to the ethical dimensions of the affair while it’s taking place, neither does he seem especially troubled by them, and certainly not so much as to accept the justice of his punishment.

Which leaves us with the second possibility, namely that Lurie refuses to go along with the compromises offered to him because he does not regard the loss of his position at the university as particularly troubling, nor in any case as worth sacrificing his mildly Byronic self-image to preserve. He is by his own description an indifferent teacher, he has at best a dutiful interest in his subject matter (communications rather than literature), he is no more than a modest scholar, he’s fifty-two years old, in no fear (perhaps erroneously) of losing his pension, and he has both other projects to occupy his time (the Byron opera) and alternative practical arrangements (at Lucy’s farm) to support himself. He has few enough friends, it seems, at the university or in Cape Town, so his loss of social standing is moderate, and would likely be little better even if he were to keep his job by admitting fault and undergoing counseling. So why, finally, should he bend at all far to achieve a solution that on the whole may be worse (as far as he’s concerned at the time) than the worst-case outcome of the inquiry?

This last option strikes me as by far the most plausible, and it has several advantages as part of a larger reading of the novel. Most importantly, it avoids any suggestion of Lurie as a victim of the commission, which in turn preserves more interpretive options with respect to the later attack and reduces the risk of needing to read the novel (against all evidence of Coetzee’s own political convictions, not that these need necessarily be controlling) as politically objectionable. It also avoids sanctifying Lurie from the outset, which would produce a very static reading indeed. Finally, it preserves a sense of Lurie as a plausible character in his own right, rather than making him a solely allegorical figure. This last point is important not because we’re trying to avoid allegory (why and how could we?), but because the allegorical reading we eventually do construct will be much richer if it’s built up from complex characters than from simple ones.

…

So that’s one question down, many to go. More to come …

A while back, I blogged about some issues in Coetzee criticism. As I’m continuing work on my own essay about Disgrace, I’ve come up with a list of questions that I think every critic should be able to answer about the book before writing on it. These aren’t the only relevant questions, of course, nor does answering them constitute criticism proper. But they’re the prerequisites of criticism; if you can’t take and defend a position on each of them, you haven’t thought hard enough about the novel and its tensions to offer a coherent reading of the work as a whole.

The questions, in loose order of dependence (but definitely out of textual order):

1. Why does Lurie give up his job by refusing to defend himself before the inquiry?
2. Why does Lurie sleep with Bev, and she with him?
3. How are we to treat Lurie’s opera?
4. Why does Lurie give up the dog at the end of the novel?
5. In what sense, if any, is Bev Shaw’s (and Lurie’s) euthanasia of the dogs an ethical/merciful/loving act?
6. Why does Lucy refuse to report her rape or otherwise pursue legal remedy for it?
7. Why does Lucy remain on the farm after the attack?
8. What is the relationship between the two rapes?

[Note: Links from each question above point to the post with my answer to it.]

As I say, certainly not the only questions one could or should ask about the novel. But they’re crucial because they address the specific content of Coetzee’s allegorical meaning. It’s not enough to claim that the book is, for example, an allegory of South African society after apartheid (which is to say almost nothing at all, yet seems to satisfy many critics); you need to work out the tenor of that allegory. And it turns out that that’s a difficult and fraught thing to do, because it requires you to take positions on questions like these about which the novel is ambivalent or ambiguous or flatly contradictory. But that’s why we get paid the big bucks, isn’t it?

My own answers to each of these in the coming days …

A bit more on Disgrace. Talking things over with Liz Evans, she pointed out that the specific charge leveled against Lurie by Melanie Isaacs isn’t entirely clear; we’re never told anything beyond the fact that it involves an alleged breach of “article 3.1 of the university’s Code of Conduct,” which “addresses victimization or harassment of students by teachers” and is a subsection of article 3, concerning “victimization or harassment on grounds of race, ethnic group, religion, gender, sexual preference, or disability” (38-39). Nor do we see the content of Melanie’s statement to the committee (which statement Lurie claims not to have read, though it has been provided to him). [Footnote: There’s also the technical charge of irregularity in grading and recordkeeping, but that is obviously a subsidiary matter, probably best understood as a gesture toward bureaucratic verisimilitude and an attempt to raise the probability of conviction by including a lesser but more easily proven allegation.] The members of the committee refer to the charges alternately as involving “harassment,” “abuse,” and “exploitation.” But it seems unlikely—this was Liz’s point—that they involve rape; if they did, it’s hard to imagine the committee entertaining the possibility that Lurie would retain his position at the university (which does appear to be the suggestion, provided he is willing to make a sincere apology and undergo counseling, etc.).

Why is this important? Because it’s part of the analogy between Melanie’s mistreatment and Lucy’s, hence of the structural and allegorical parallel between colonial violence and retributive justice. I hadn’t noticed this fact concerning Melanie’s accusation, but it adds another important way in which she resembles Lucy; they both present a legal claim to the authorities, but withhold from their accounts any mention of rape. This strengthens the parallel between the two women, and thus reinforces our obligation to make sense of the similarities and differences in the way they’re treated, in the ways they respond to that treatment, and in their respective social and historical positions.

I just received a copy—via ILL, on microfilm, from Johannesburg—of an opinion piece on Disgrace from the Sowetan (by Aggrey Klaaste, 3 April 2000, p. 9). It’s one that I had seen referenced in a couple of places, but had never before been able to read. Nothing of interest as literary criticism, but it’s a potentially useful fragment of documentation concerning the novel’s initial political reception in South Africa. If you’re interested, I’ve put up a marginal-quality PDF copy (what can I say, it’s a scan of a printout from microfilm.)

Also: The fact that it took two months to get a hold of this article—and that there were many more that were simply unobtainable at a major U.S. research university with a diligent ILL department—illustrates part of the problem with doing politically and culturally informed work on Coetzee outside South Africa. It’s certainly not impossible, and I don’t mean to overplay the difficulty, but the primary sources are much trickier to track down than I expected them to be.

Also also: Microfilm apparently still exists.

A bit more on the function of debt in Disgrace, especially with respect to the TRC.

I’ve been trying to figure out how punishment works as a form of compensation for the victims of ethical and legal wrongs (which are not the same thing). In an earlier post, I moved away from the idea that legal (i.e., state-sanctioned, tribunal-mediated) punishment was intended to provide a compensatory satisfaction to those who have been wronged. I think this is generally true, at least as a theoretical principle of modern law; it’s one of the reasons, for instance, that “victims’ rights” remains a marginal concept. (The other being, of course, that the state is now understood to intervene between perpetrator and victim, so that the victim isn’t a proper party to the exercise of legal justice.)

But what about institutions like the TRC, which I claimed in my ACLA paper do serve a significantly compensatory function? How so? Well, it’s partially that they provide something of value to the victim in a context where more direct compensation in the form of reparations, significant socioeconomic restructuring, etc. is unlikely. But there’s more to it than that, I think. The desire of victims to receive a “sincere” apology—illustrated at some length in Coetzee’s novel through both the reactions of Melanie’s family and David’s souring relationship with Petrus—is a desire to see the perpetrator suffer the pangs of conscience. The victim in such cases enjoys, takes satisfaction in, the perpetrator’s self-punishment, which is more harsh than most of what can be otherwise imposed on the perpetrator (as evinced by the obvious inadequacy, to most of those involved, of Lurie merely losing his job absent any sincere expression of contrition). So there’s a sense in which legal punishment, even today, is intended to provide a kind of repayment to the victim, and this is especially true in the case of (pseudo) tribunals like the TRC that are intended to address large-scale historical wrongs.

Note, too, that all this is a theory of law and rights that’s presupposed by and enables the bad reading of Coetzee developed and critiqued in my paper, not something that I’m insisting is necessarily the basis of all contemporary law. In any case, though, Coetzee is in a way law-agnostic; his real analysis is of ethics or morality, which he is at pains to show work differently. That’s the point of Lurie’s encounter with the commission, which mixes law and ethics in a way that doesn’t work well for either one.

A quick follow-up to this past weekend’s ACLA conference. My seminar was on literature and law; it was interesting and useful indeed, despite being a bit to the side of what I usually do. If you’re interested, I’ve posted a copy of my paper (PDF); a more formal treatment is in the works.

The talk argues that while a legal framework in which ethical wrongs are treated as analogous to economic debts is probably inevitable, Coetzee’s novel shows how this economic treatment is inadequate as a basis of moral action. Specifically, the economic analogy enables—maybe even requires—bad readings of Disgrace, ones in which Lurie becomes the true victim insofar as he pays out of all proportion for his offense against Melanie. If we drop the debt model, we can also avoid this problem.

Joey Slaughter, one of the co-conveners of the seminar, objected that contemporary understandings of the law are not in fact based on such an economic model, which struck him as “premodern” (of the eye-for-an-eye type). I see the point, which is similar to Foucault’s analysis in Discipline and Punish; we no longer think that the task of punishment is to provide a compensatory enjoyment for the victim, whether the victim in question is understood to be the directly harmed individual or the state/corporate body as a whole. All true, and I may have drifted perilously close to suggesting something along those lines. But my point had less to do with victims or with punishment as payment than it did with an “account balance” of sorts for the perpetrator. The idea—which I was suggesting underlies the principle of proportionality in sentencing and that Coetzee rejects as an adequate account of morality (but not necessarily of law)—is that punishments should deprive the perpetrator of any surplus or advantage accumulated through his offense (plus an additional deterrent amount, though I didn’t raise that point in the talk for lack of time).

The easier version is when the offense is straightforwardly economic, though even then it’s not dead simple. If I steal $10 from you, I’ll need to repay that amount, plus a deterrent amount, plus whatever we collectively deem appropriate for the inherent damage caused by a violation of the law (related, for instance, to the fact that we all feel less secure once we’ve experienced the fact of theft). It’s harder—and this is one of the novel’s points—when the violation in question is non- or supra-economic (as with rape, exploitation, etc.). But in either case, the idea isn’t to repay the victim by allowing her to enjoy the perpetrator’s suffering (which plainly doesn’t work, as the novel demonstrates at length), it’s to deprive the perpetrator of his illegitimately accrued advantage. What the proper balance should be is a tricky question, but it’s also what the law must do. Ethics, on the other hand (and this is my reading of Coetzee), doesn’t let you off even after you’ve paid a compensatory amount; there is nothing you can do to fix or to balance your sins, and no amount of your suffering offsets them. If you’ve been wronged in turn, you don’t break even at some point, ethically speaking—you just go on being wrong. True, you’ve now been wronged, too, but that’s of a different order; there’s no universal ethical as opposed to legal account to settle.

Depressing stuff, perhaps, but then Coetzee isn’t the author for joy. More on this to come at some point.

[Update: See also this follow-up post and the series on baseline questions about Disgrace.]

A question occasioned by the fact that only two people out of the dozen or so in my ACLA seminar today had read Disgrace: Can you think of any single work of fiction written in the last decade that one could reasonably expect nearly everyone in a room full of literature professors to have read? I would have said Disgrace, and I’d have been wrong.