Let me first say it simply: JM Coetzee’s latest novel, Disgrace, is a remarkable work. The narrative opens with an exploration of the diminished circumstances of an aging scholar, David Lurie, teaching at an institution which has given itself over to instrumental education (here, the Technical University of Cape Town). Coetzee explores with irony and sensuality the circumstances of one who finds his domain of intellectual pursuit to be scorned by the new dispensation: how then to retain any sense of rapture with the world, how to live, ethically, in a way that is adequate to one’s desire?
Now teaching communications 101, the protagonist’s last tenuous access to the ”banquet of the senses” is through occasional sexual encounters. This precipitates a professional and personal crisis as he becomes the subject of a sexual harassment inquiry at the university. While acknowledging his culpability, he refuses to engage in the required discourses of repentance which will allow him to be reintegrated into the university community.
The disgraced academic, having been cast aside, visits his daughter who lives alone in the Eastern Cape. Her meagre life is sustained by running kennels and through small-scale market gardening. Here Lurie finds the lightweight temporary refuge of an ascetic not unappealing, though his intellectual and aesthetic drives become fugitive, and his projected opera on Byron slips below the surface.
When Lurie and his daughter are violently assaulted in their home by men feigning to need help, the texture of the novel seems to shift. The complexities of the questions around the burden of historical guilt and the failure of sympathetic imagination wrestle against more urgent and pressing impulses: how to sustain a life that has become so precarious, without capitulating to the aggressive act itself?
Coetzee’s novel is remarkable in its gauging of the contemporary dilemmas arising from our circumstances in a society obsessed by our own violent context. The failure of imagination is, it would seem, at the heart of the matter, and here Disgrace obliquely invokes Coetzee’s other recent publication, The Lives of Animals. In it, a novelist, Elizabeth Costello, gives a series of lectures on animal rights (this text was itself presented by Coetzee at Princeton University).
Yet in The Lives of Animals Coetzee seems to be asking, in the first instance: ”What are the consequences for animals of our failure to imagine that animals are sentient beings which should have rights?” In Disgrace, Coetzee is, at one level, asking: ”What are the consequences for ourselves as people of our failure to imagine that animals are sentient beings which should have rights?”
Coetzee nowhere draws the crude corollary that if we were kinder to animals we would be kinder to people; rather, these two works in conjunction explore the sealing off of imaginative identification that has been a necessary precondition for us to engage in the long-term and sustained business of slaughter.
There is a curious synchrony, not necessarily apparent at first glance, in the almost concurrent emergence of Coetzee’s novel and Thomas Harris’s Hannibal. In overt terms, the works could not be more dissimilar: Harris’s novel is a cunning and deftly written thriller, which brings with it a sense of its status as a shocker, part of which thrill gives the work its exaggerated commodity value. Coetzee’s novel is a nuanced and pained exploration of the impossibility of ethical action.
What the two works do have in common is a philosophical legacy arising out of Enlightenment questions around ”sympathy”. It is useful to remember that the context in which these debates arose in 18th-century England (evoked expressly in Disgrace: Byron, Lurie’s alter ego, was born in 1788) was an era of massive urbanisation and geographical upheaval which introduced harsh new laws about private property. As Europe, and particularly England, moved toward a proto- modern cash-nexus system that broke feudal bonds of obligation, moral philosophers attempted to interpret the implications of the new social order.
The end of the 18th century was characterised by the emergence of so-called writers of ”sensibility” who emphasised compassion as the highest of all moral sentiments. Henry MacKenzie’s A Man of Feeling takes its protagonist on a journey where he repeatedly meets up with strangers whose plights move him to tears. In attempting to understand such sympathetic identification, Adam Smith (author of The Wealth of Nations) wrote, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments:
”By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations.”
These languages of sympathy produced, at the extreme end of the continuum, writer- philosophers such as the Marquis de Sade, who celebrated the breakdown of boundaries between individual subjects. For Sade (after whom sadism was named) this philosophy found a logical culmination in situations of sexual extremity, in which participants would attempt to use sex acts to break down the horizons that retain us each as individual subjects: the acts would frequently include episodes of mutual humiliation as well as physical conquest.
Byron, identified in the English imagination as the great libertine of his age, was associated with the violation of taboos, incestuous liaisons and multiple affairs. The other great work of libertine English literature is Clarissa, a vast novel by Samuel Richardson, in which the female protagonist is raped by her captor, Lovelace. It is striking to note that the female protagonist in Hannibal is named Clarice; Harris is, I think, invoking a long tradition celebrating the libertine violation of the individual and private rights: a bourgeois, puritan tradition which conflated individual and property rights, that MacPherson was to name ”possessive individualism”.
Lurie, with his engagement with Byron, is situated by Coetzee as heir to such a philosophic tradition. In an unlikely sense, too, Coetzee places himself within that tradition, exploring the ethical problems arising from a collapse of boundaries between self and other, in The Lives of Animals. For Hannibal, this results in cannibalism; in Coetzee (or Costello, the ostensible writer of the Animals lectures) this is expressed as a refusal to submit to the instrumentalising of other flesh, and the extension of identification and sympathy to animals as well as humans.
Coetzee himself violates several taboos in Disgrace, engaging with subject matter that is generally silenced: his protagonist is a white male found guilty of sexual harassment, whose daughter is raped by a black man, although, as in Richardson’s Clarissa, the rape is never described: it remains an agonising silence at the heart of the text.
So too, Lucy Lurie’s rape is never described, not ever even spoken to her father. We are required to consider, when reading this novel, what are the implications for our social and subjective identities, when we live, as we do, enclaved off from one another, defensive, having shut ourselves against sympathy, no longer ready to stop at the scene of an accident, for fear of our own safety.
But the novel is remarkable in that it is so much a novel – the narrative is compelling, wonderful in its evocation of familiar circumstances, beautiful in its simplicity. For any reader with an interest in questions arising around issues of truth and reconciliation, or capital punishment, or global discourses on war crimes, or gender and identity, this is a significant work.
Disgrace considers the failure of a Western liberal tradition premised upon an 18th- century model of philosophical sympathy that is at the same time at the heart of commodity culture, a culture which contradictorily holds as sacred the absolute rights of the individual and the absolute value of private property – as I noted earlier, Adam Smith was author of both The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations.
Also, anyone interested in the art of the writer should read Disgrace.
Jane Taylor is the author of Ubu and the Truth Commission, published by University of Cape Town Press.