I had a little trouble with Lucy's character towards the end. She's a little uber-pious. Coetzee seems to have a some trouble with that himself. But overall, a fantastic work. I loved the image of [the narrator, whatsisname?] straining to create this minor, flawed operetta about Byron, himself a flawed artist. You might even look at it as the narrator overcoming, in small part, his own narcissism, which was probably also Byron's flaw, and rediscovering his own humanity. He does it by caring for sick animals, and suffering various forms of humiliation.
what's unbelievable is that Lucy doesn't seem to have to struggle with the decision at all. Maybe some people are perfect in self-sacrifice and humility, but damn, it's irritating.
Coetzee's style is humbling. To be able to convey a richness of character and maintain such spare sentences is pretty rare.
you know, I tend to think coetzee is not capable of creating believable female characters in general. Lucy not only strains credulity but I get queasy about how the narrator seems to ultimately come around to her point of view that, somehow, her gang-rape is a reparation by white people as-a-whole for the historical wrongs done to black people in south africa. this just seems like a perverted and horrible way for coetzee to write his novel (pardon the strong language, but I did genuinely find it sickening, in the same way that Breaking the Waves by Lars von Trier is sickening), and James Wood puts it better than I do. His full review is available on-line, but here are a few snippets:
"It is the form of Disgrace, not its content, that makes the reader uneasy. For the novel's shape does seem to insist on the necessity of Lucy's "punishment." It is a matter of symmetry. David has erred, committing a virtual rape against Melanie, and the novel's function is to wear down his complacent cynicism so that, in a late scene, he visits Melanie's parents and atones for his earlier involvement with their daughter. "In my own terms," he tells Melanie's father, "I am being punished for what happened between myself and your daughter . . . trying to accept disgrace as my state of being." This is David's "disgrace" and penitence. Lucy's "disgrace," of course, is not one that she earned or deserved; but in pairing the two forms of penitence, the novel comes unpleasantly close to suggesting a formal parallel of disgrace, in which both characters enact "necessary" falls.
This is a significant weakness, and it returns us to Coetzee's limitations, which are the limitations of allegory. Disgrace is so firmly plotted and shaped, so clearly blocked out, that it seems to request a kind of clarity of reading which is ultimately simplifying and harmful to the novel, in which "issues" are shared out between the generations, and split into willing binarisms: young and old, liberal and conservative, man and woman, straight and gay. Around this, the novel's architecture attempts to fuse these binarisms, by arguing for a kind of parallelism. It as if the form of the book tells us that despite the oppositions of Lucy and her father, both characters share more than they divide, for here are two people undergoing their different-but-similar forms of disgrace. And then, as a capstone, the novel's title powerfully extracts the essence of these two experiences, and unites them in one clipped word, and one strong theme: disgrace. ..."
ogged, you might enjoy other Coetzee novels, such as Waiting for the Barbarians or Foe (which I remember as a fascinating Robinson Crusoe rewrite).
I don't know, mmf. Does the fact of the two characters' character arcs -- the two "disgraces" -- necessarily imply that they are both of the same kind, both deserving? Or is Lucy never in a true state of "disgrace?"
I think Coetzee wants to hold us all to a very high standard of conduct -- to Lucy's standard. She does the right thing not because she "deserved" her rape in any way, but for the fact that she absolutely did not deserve it. She is turning the other cheek.
If you find it unrealistic, well I think I do too. But I don't think Lucy's decision, or Coetzee's structure requires that we think of Lucy as having deserved her rape.
also: do you not think Elizabeth Costello is a convincing character?
I'm not usually very convinced by arguments that a work means one thing or another, based purely on the structure of the work. At least not as applied to novels.
Couldn't the two plot lines just as easily contrast against each other? Could it be that Coetzee is playing with different kinds of "disgrace" -- different meanings of the word, with vastly different connotations?
Hmm. I'm not sure I buy that criticism. "Disgrace" is the theme, but it's not at all clear that "disgrace" is the name for what happens to Lucy, and in fact that very question is what's at issue between her and David. There may be some inevitability in what happens to David and to Lucy, but they "enact" different sides of the same dynamic: David is the male transgressor, using his power to "seduce" Melanie, while Lucy is the used female, part of the very land that other men want. How they respond to what they do and what's done to them is, again, what's at issue in using the word "disgrace."
well, first of all, i do NOT think Lucy is doing "the right thing" (whatever that would mean in her situation)!
second of all, i do think that the novel very powerfully asks us to consider the two characters' experiences as parallel. This doesn't mean that Lucy *deserves* the rape exactly, as an individual. However, it does mean that she (& the narrator) are willing to turn her individual self into a symbol of expiation, an semi-innocent individual who is punished for a group guilt -- taking on the group's guilt, being broken for it. (That's why I compared it to Breaking the Waves - Emily Watson's character is also an innocent). The novel's flirtation with this self-sacrifice, Lucy's rape as a symbolic reparation for decades of south african apartheid (she calls it, among other things, her "payment" to occupy the land) is deeply troubling to me. The novel is far too complicated and fruitfully contradictory to say it unilaterally endorses it. However the narrator does align himself with a worldview in which this sacrifice makes symbolic sense in many ways - more than can be ignored.
Here's the last, very good, paragraph from Wood, which follows on the heels of the previous two, and then I am off to bed (it's nearly 1am in my time zone!):
"That these suspicions should arise has to do with Coetzee's fondness for intellectual and formal tidiness. Some will find this tension between the neatly allegorical and the complicatedly novelistic fruitful, and masterfully governed by Coetzee; but it is also possible to see it as a barely managed contradiction, in which the allegorical, alas, has pride of place in Coetzee's large quiver of talents. If the novel is finally more complicated than this, and more beneficially self-confounding, this is a tribute not only to Coetzee's difficult powers, but also to the very nature of novelistic narrative, which inherently tends towards the dramatic corrugation, rather than the thematic flattening, of ideas."
p.s. text, i have to admit to not getting around to elizabeth costello - have only read most of the novels coetzee wrote before winning the nobel prize.
But I don't think we're denying that they're parallel (but what the parallelism means is at issue), and she's clearly a symbol, if you believe in symbolism. And what happens to her is also true: it's satisfying for black South Africans, after years of horrible suffering and emasculation, and the rape of their women, to rape white women. But I don't think that you can get out of all that the notion that Coetzee thinks that what happens to Lucy is in any way right.
Regarding Van Zandt, before we regret that he slowly killed himself, compare the quality and quantity of his work with that of Paul McCartney.
From the vantage of music, at what point in McCartney's life would it have been optimal for him to have passed on to his final reward? Quite awhile back, but how far back? Not everyon will agree with me that it would have been right before Sergeant Pepper, but perhaps we could get a discussion.
Just think how much better a world it would be if Wagner, like Mussorgsky, had drunk himself to death after two operas,? No WWII, no holocaust, no Churchill cult.
perhaps bad form of me to rejoin when you have tucked in, but I think Woods' reasoning is a little circular.
Woods seems to base his reading on "Coetzee's fondness for intellectual and formal tidiness." But I see no evidence for that fondness in Disgrace. If you start from the premise that Coetzee's novel must be a tight allegory, then you might come to the conclusion that Lucy's rape is payment for the wrongs of the white man, or something.
But I see no basis for that premise. I'd let Coetzee's other works stand for themselves, and Disgrace stand for whatever it says. In Disgrace, I'll concede we have two "rapes," but I don't see one as payment for the other, and certainly, I don't see the narrator -- the rapist -- as a stand-in for his daughter -- the raped. It just doesn't work.
I think Coetzee -- to the extent that he butts in -- approves of Lucy's capacity for forgiveness. It seems beyond saintly, yes. But to forgive an act of violence is not the same as declaring to have deserved it, on a literal or allegorical level.
Man, I like the late Beatles. I just wish Paul hadn't written that wonderful christmastime ditty. He needed someone to constantly remind him about doing it in the road.
I am lame for remembering the particular thread you are alluding to, and requesting that you review it, as if life is really long, and we needed more to fill it.
Given the subject matter I think Coetzee should be applauded for the fact that mmf!'s politicized reading isn't indisputably correct. I think for that reason—because the rape-as-allegory reading is a provocative angle that not only captures a certain reality about the relations between races today, but also seems like an evident thing that would occur to a South African writer worth his salt—it's a meaning that the book intentionally touches upon but ultimately doesn't take up.
I do agree that Lucy must be read in some way beyond the literal. It struck me at the time that her unrealistic response to rape mirrors unrealistic or unfair expectations of women faced with disgrace, but it's been a while since I read and my book recall is miserable.
that that John Emerson is one wild counterfactualist. But then it struck me: I had an argument like this with Emerson before, but it was long ago, and in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.
I have no idea what "the wench" is in this scenario, but I'm sure text has an opinion.
Can you be more precise about the location of these posts, O Ben? (Note that I said the link to Tim's post, which left little doubt as to what slol needed to do.)
So slolerner, you don't agree that if Harald Hardrada had had a few less drinks, Amartya Sen would be writing in Norwegian today? You spoil all the fun.
In honor of the thread, just moved the Texas Troubadour Box Set (1st 6 albums) over to my playlist in order. I usually shuffle and so only hear a song once in a blue moon and don't know him that well.
Or should I listen to the first two records three times? Am open to suggestions.
Is there, in the entire corpus of Coetzee, a single character who combines moral excellence, or even basic decency, with power, effectiveness and initiative? Just asking...
Elizabeth Costello. The narrator in Waiting For The Barbarians, in the second half of the book. Lucy in Disgrace -- she gets raped, but I don't think that's cause to question her effectiveness or initiative. I've only read those three books, but that's one character in each.
Elizabeth Costello -- at least in the Tanner lecture version --is not exactly what I had in mind as *effective/powerful*. She lectures people, sure, and is respected (?) in anacademic world, but she feels overwhelmed by the indifference of people to the 'holocaust' she sees around her. Is the novel different?
I'd say, in as much as a professional writer can be effective/powerful, Elizabeth Costello is effective/powerful (though we don't have access to her actual work, and can't say whether she's any good or not). She is powerful in her personal interactions. She gets her way. In her lectures, she says what she wants to say. We also get glimpses of her younger self, who was very willful.
I guess you could say that the novel is agnostic as to whether Elizabeth Costello is "effective." In the end, she is stuck in hell, or purgatory. I think the novel questions whether the novel itself is an effective medium for conveying ideas, or anything. So in that sense, maybe I rushed to call her effective. But she is powerful, so that's one for two.
Her sister, the nun, is both effective and powerful. She is as strong-willed as Elizabeth, and what she's doing seems to be working.
::But I don't think we're denying that they're parallel (but what the parallelism means is at issue), and she's clearly a symbol, if you believe in symbolism. And what happens to her is also true: it's satisfying for black South Africans, after years of horrible suffering and emasculation, and the rape of their women, to rape white women. But I don't think that you can get out of all that the notion that Coetzee thinks that what happens to Lucy is in any way right.
to ogged's point:
Lucy (if you look at the text) describes her own situation as a "payment" (the narrator says "reparation" I believe). Lucy is willing to turn herself into a figure bearing the weight of white guilt or black demands for reparation. That's a question of psychology (is it believable or not that she does it?) The transformation of the narrator into someone who gets her logic, and thinks it might work as a symbolic means of making south africa a livable place again, ethically, for white South Africans -- that somehow both groups will be able to live together in the future thanks to this symbolic logic where Lucy's body is the "payment" the surrounding farmers receive -- is Coetzee's way of setting up this symbolic logic as a possible way of adjustment to life in a new south africa, or a reading of that adjustment (for those of us who aren't South African).
It's not a question of whether Coetzee thinks it's "right" or "wrong" that she got raped. (Even if I didn't think it was useless to speculate on authorial intentions, I would say the novel is ipso facto a genre that prizes ambiguity and moral complexity, and in that sense Coetzee has written a successful novel. It's Wood's argument too: the novel as a literary form has saved Coetzee from being too schematic.)
However, it IS a question as to whether Coetzee is setting up this rape, once it's happened, as a way of imaginatively righting a wrong situation - creating a symbolic "repayment" - so that life can go forward in this community. Does this rape, and Lucy's acceptance and forgiveness of it, work? Can it create this watershed, be a correction for the past - not on the level of individual personal ethics ("should they have raped her" - obviously; no) but on the level of symbolism for the community?
Because he's a good novelist, Coetzee presents you with counterevidence as well as evidence. However, I think he does definitely present this as a working possibility - that the rape (and de facto marriage of Lucy to the black farmer - remember, that is forced on her too, and she bears a mixed-race child from the union that will live in the new community and new nation) could be the cathartic event that makes living together in the new South Africa possible.
The symbolic logic: gang-rape of the white daughter of the landowner (communal action of violence), her marriage to the black overseer, and the mixed-race baby is a "righting" of the previous situation (the historical violence against the segregated, subjugated blacks). Symbol: an individual (or really, just her body: a material object) standing in for a larger non-material entity (the history of black slavery and servitude in South Africa, and its reversal through uprising).
You can agree or disagree with me about whether or not this is story, and subtext, that is interesting and provocative and one that you like seeing Coetzee explore, or whether it makes for a fantasy of nationhood and race relations that you would rather not experience vicariously or pass along to others, because it's not your taste. But you can't seriously dispute that this symbolic logic is going on in the text.
And that's just a hermeneutical observation, devoid for the moment of politics - those would be an addition not made here.)
the parallelism: both the narrator father and his daughter Lucy are described as experiencing "disgrace" - a word that resonates several times this way in the text. Since it's the title of the novel, that sets them up in parallel positions in a very prominent way: two characters who seem very different and do not understand each other but come to some mutual recognition of a commonality.
The commonality seems to be a transformative redemptive movement - the father's predicated on the daughter - and once again I suggest "Breaking the Waves" as a good intertext.
the second parallelism I didn't cite as much but is one of the reasons Coetzee's novel is interesting, not a political pamphlet (which I haven't ever claimed!). Here it is in schematic form: the narrator, a father, who commits an act which he later comes to see as rape of his much younger student vs. the gang-rape of Lucy, his daughter, who inherits the political situation in south africa, who will find a way (through the rape and birth of the child conceived during it) to continue living on the south african land.
See the structure coetzee set up, which he goes on to clothe with his spare prose? It's too bad i can't do columns and outline it here.
I give up on this, mmf. I concede that Coetzee is playing with themes about how whites and blacks can coexist in south africa's future, and what it will require of them. But I don't find any of it offensive, for the reason that I don't think he ever condones the rapes. He sees them as horrible acts, and the issue is, how do you deal with these horrible acts? Whatever symbolism there is in the book, I don't think it changes that reading.
i think the problem is that you are reading my comments with the idea: "mmf is trying to tell me that Coetzee is offensive and that he condones rape."
and i'm not... it's true that i came into this conversation by saying i don't like the book. i still don't. but an evaluative reaction (good, bad) is different from a hermeneutic one (talking about the book's formal structure; the repetition of words or acts; the accumulation of subtexts of meaning).
and i do think one of the things Coetzee is putting out there is the idea of Lucy's gang-rape as a form of reparation that paves the way for a new future of living together without segregation and makes the living together possible. Lucy invests the rape with that meaning - a self-sacrifice which is "payment," which somehow redresses historic grievances. at first we (with the narrator) don't understand, or even think it's crazy and then gradually are encouraged to understand it more and more, to see it as working this way, to see that as positive, even redemptive.
it's fiction, so coetzee chose the plot - chose the events that the narrative takes as given - it could easily have been something different - and the basis of literary criticism is that choices are not arbitrary but instead get interpreted.
the above is disturbing. you can still like the book, of course -- good books are meant to unsettle you after all! But it's important to look straight at what the text of this novel is doing.
that's all! and i'm sorry i used the word "symbol" or "symbolic logic"; they have very precise meanings in lit crit (as does "allegory," and in this context the fact that Wood uses it means he is being even more critical of Coetzee than I am) -- but I think that when you guys hear them, you think "general fuzziness" instead of "sign coinciding with thing signified."
I'm just not sure what to do with this. You say that the words "symbol" and "allegory" are precise. They are. But I don't think Disgrace contains any precise symbols or allegories. What is the rape a symbol of, exactly, under your reading? What is Lucy a symbol of? What about the narrator? I don't think Coetzee uses precise symbols, always meaning one thing or another, in Disgrace.
I'll admit that Lucy makes the justification that you attribute to her. Are we supposed to agree with her? I don't know. I don't think the text asks us to agree or disagree with her, but merely to think about what she says.
Writers make decisions, and by all means we should analyze them, but I have a hard time coming to the conclusion that Lucy's rape was payment for her father's crimes (or the white man's crimes) based on the sequential relationship of the two occurrences. Also, I have a hard time believing that Coetzee meant Lucy as a mouthpiece for his own allegorical or symbolic messages, as opposed to a character, with her own thoughts and ideas.
Yes, I'm troubled by her decision. I don't require that I not be troubled by it. But I probably don't approach novels in the same way that you and James Woods do.
Disgrace is indeed awesome.
I had a little trouble with Lucy's character towards the end. She's a little uber-pious. Coetzee seems to have a some trouble with that himself. But overall, a fantastic work. I loved the image of [the narrator, whatsisname?] straining to create this minor, flawed operetta about Byron, himself a flawed artist. You might even look at it as the narrator overcoming, in small part, his own narcissism, which was probably also Byron's flaw, and rediscovering his own humanity. He does it by caring for sick animals, and suffering various forms of humiliation.
Anyway, Coetzee is viking cocksucker.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 3:49 PM
what's unbelievable is that Lucy doesn't seem to have to struggle with the decision at all. Maybe some people are perfect in self-sacrifice and humility, but damn, it's irritating.
Coetzee's style is humbling. To be able to convey a richness of character and maintain such spare sentences is pretty rare.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:00 PM
you know, I tend to think coetzee is not capable of creating believable female characters in general. Lucy not only strains credulity but I get queasy about how the narrator seems to ultimately come around to her point of view that, somehow, her gang-rape is a reparation by white people as-a-whole for the historical wrongs done to black people in south africa. this just seems like a perverted and horrible way for coetzee to write his novel (pardon the strong language, but I did genuinely find it sickening, in the same way that Breaking the Waves by Lars von Trier is sickening), and James Wood puts it better than I do. His full review is available on-line, but here are a few snippets:
"It is the form of Disgrace, not its content, that makes the reader uneasy. For the novel's shape does seem to insist on the necessity of Lucy's "punishment." It is a matter of symmetry. David has erred, committing a virtual rape against Melanie, and the novel's function is to wear down his complacent cynicism so that, in a late scene, he visits Melanie's parents and atones for his earlier involvement with their daughter. "In my own terms," he tells Melanie's father, "I am being punished for what happened between myself and your daughter . . . trying to accept disgrace as my state of being." This is David's "disgrace" and penitence. Lucy's "disgrace," of course, is not one that she earned or deserved; but in pairing the two forms of penitence, the novel comes unpleasantly close to suggesting a formal parallel of disgrace, in which both characters enact "necessary" falls.
This is a significant weakness, and it returns us to Coetzee's limitations, which are the limitations of allegory. Disgrace is so firmly plotted and shaped, so clearly blocked out, that it seems to request a kind of clarity of reading which is ultimately simplifying and harmful to the novel, in which "issues" are shared out between the generations, and split into willing binarisms: young and old, liberal and conservative, man and woman, straight and gay. Around this, the novel's architecture attempts to fuse these binarisms, by arguing for a kind of parallelism. It as if the form of the book tells us that despite the oppositions of Lucy and her father, both characters share more than they divide, for here are two people undergoing their different-but-similar forms of disgrace. And then, as a capstone, the novel's title powerfully extracts the essence of these two experiences, and unites them in one clipped word, and one strong theme: disgrace. ..."
ogged, you might enjoy other Coetzee novels, such as Waiting for the Barbarians or Foe (which I remember as a fascinating Robinson Crusoe rewrite).
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:08 PM
I don't know, mmf. Does the fact of the two characters' character arcs -- the two "disgraces" -- necessarily imply that they are both of the same kind, both deserving? Or is Lucy never in a true state of "disgrace?"
I think Coetzee wants to hold us all to a very high standard of conduct -- to Lucy's standard. She does the right thing not because she "deserved" her rape in any way, but for the fact that she absolutely did not deserve it. She is turning the other cheek.
If you find it unrealistic, well I think I do too. But I don't think Lucy's decision, or Coetzee's structure requires that we think of Lucy as having deserved her rape.
also: do you not think Elizabeth Costello is a convincing character?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:15 PM
I'm not usually very convinced by arguments that a work means one thing or another, based purely on the structure of the work. At least not as applied to novels.
Couldn't the two plot lines just as easily contrast against each other? Could it be that Coetzee is playing with different kinds of "disgrace" -- different meanings of the word, with vastly different connotations?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:19 PM
Hmm. I'm not sure I buy that criticism. "Disgrace" is the theme, but it's not at all clear that "disgrace" is the name for what happens to Lucy, and in fact that very question is what's at issue between her and David. There may be some inevitability in what happens to David and to Lucy, but they "enact" different sides of the same dynamic: David is the male transgressor, using his power to "seduce" Melanie, while Lucy is the used female, part of the very land that other men want. How they respond to what they do and what's done to them is, again, what's at issue in using the word "disgrace."
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:20 PM
It seems text and I agree.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:21 PM
hooray!
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:23 PM
well, first of all, i do NOT think Lucy is doing "the right thing" (whatever that would mean in her situation)!
second of all, i do think that the novel very powerfully asks us to consider the two characters' experiences as parallel. This doesn't mean that Lucy *deserves* the rape exactly, as an individual. However, it does mean that she (& the narrator) are willing to turn her individual self into a symbol of expiation, an semi-innocent individual who is punished for a group guilt -- taking on the group's guilt, being broken for it. (That's why I compared it to Breaking the Waves - Emily Watson's character is also an innocent). The novel's flirtation with this self-sacrifice, Lucy's rape as a symbolic reparation for decades of south african apartheid (she calls it, among other things, her "payment" to occupy the land) is deeply troubling to me. The novel is far too complicated and fruitfully contradictory to say it unilaterally endorses it. However the narrator does align himself with a worldview in which this sacrifice makes symbolic sense in many ways - more than can be ignored.
Here's the last, very good, paragraph from Wood, which follows on the heels of the previous two, and then I am off to bed (it's nearly 1am in my time zone!):
"That these suspicions should arise has to do with Coetzee's fondness for intellectual and formal tidiness. Some will find this tension between the neatly allegorical and the complicatedly novelistic fruitful, and masterfully governed by Coetzee; but it is also possible to see it as a barely managed contradiction, in which the allegorical, alas, has pride of place in Coetzee's large quiver of talents. If the novel is finally more complicated than this, and more beneficially self-confounding, this is a tribute not only to Coetzee's difficult powers, but also to the very nature of novelistic narrative, which inherently tends towards the dramatic corrugation, rather than the thematic flattening, of ideas."
p.s. text, i have to admit to not getting around to elizabeth costello - have only read most of the novels coetzee wrote before winning the nobel prize.
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:32 PM
But I don't think we're denying that they're parallel (but what the parallelism means is at issue), and she's clearly a symbol, if you believe in symbolism. And what happens to her is also true: it's satisfying for black South Africans, after years of horrible suffering and emasculation, and the rape of their women, to rape white women. But I don't think that you can get out of all that the notion that Coetzee thinks that what happens to Lucy is in any way right.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:41 PM
Regarding Van Zandt, before we regret that he slowly killed himself, compare the quality and quantity of his work with that of Paul McCartney.
From the vantage of music, at what point in McCartney's life would it have been optimal for him to have passed on to his final reward? Quite awhile back, but how far back? Not everyon will agree with me that it would have been right before Sergeant Pepper, but perhaps we could get a discussion.
Just think how much better a world it would be if Wagner, like Mussorgsky, had drunk himself to death after two operas,? No WWII, no holocaust, no Churchill cult.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:42 PM
perhaps bad form of me to rejoin when you have tucked in, but I think Woods' reasoning is a little circular.
Woods seems to base his reading on "Coetzee's fondness for intellectual and formal tidiness." But I see no evidence for that fondness in Disgrace. If you start from the premise that Coetzee's novel must be a tight allegory, then you might come to the conclusion that Lucy's rape is payment for the wrongs of the white man, or something.
But I see no basis for that premise. I'd let Coetzee's other works stand for themselves, and Disgrace stand for whatever it says. In Disgrace, I'll concede we have two "rapes," but I don't see one as payment for the other, and certainly, I don't see the narrator -- the rapist -- as a stand-in for his daughter -- the raped. It just doesn't work.
I think Coetzee -- to the extent that he butts in -- approves of Lucy's capacity for forgiveness. It seems beyond saintly, yes. But to forgive an act of violence is not the same as declaring to have deserved it, on a literal or allegorical level.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:43 PM
It seems text and I agree.
Ogged got this just right.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:46 PM
Man, I like the late Beatles. I just wish Paul hadn't written that wonderful christmastime ditty. He needed someone to constantly remind him about doing it in the road.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:47 PM
13 is unfair, ogged. I think if you review the thread you are alluding to, you'll see why.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:49 PM
Yeah yeah, I couldn't resist.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:50 PM
I am lame for remembering the particular thread you are alluding to, and requesting that you review it, as if life is really long, and we needed more to fill it.
when did unfogged envelop my soul?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 4:52 PM
Given the subject matter I think Coetzee should be applauded for the fact that mmf!'s politicized reading isn't indisputably correct. I think for that reason—because the rape-as-allegory reading is a provocative angle that not only captures a certain reality about the relations between races today, but also seems like an evident thing that would occur to a South African writer worth his salt—it's a meaning that the book intentionally touches upon but ultimately doesn't take up.
I do agree that Lucy must be read in some way beyond the literal. It struck me at the time that her unrealistic response to rape mirrors unrealistic or unfair expectations of women faced with disgrace, but it's been a while since I read and my book recall is miserable.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 5:32 PM
I wonder, ogged, what you think of Holbo's posts on Coetzee. You'll have to follow a link to, and then from, John & Belle Have A Blog to get to them.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 5:39 PM
Hey! I was going simply to comment re JE's
No WWII, no holocaust, no Churchill cult.
that that John Emerson is one wild counterfactualist. But then it struck me: I had an argument like this with Emerson before, but it was long ago, and in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.
I have no idea what "the wench" is in this scenario, but I'm sure text has an opinion.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 5:40 PM
Can you be more precise about the location of these posts, O Ben? (Note that I said the link to Tim's post, which left little doubt as to what slol needed to do.)
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 5:44 PM
On the Valve somewhere. Here's one; there may be another but I can't recall.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 5:47 PM
Has anyone ever considered the consequences of not doing counterfactual history?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 5:50 PM
Thanks, Ben. I haven't read any other Coetzee, though.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 5:56 PM
So slolerner, you don't agree that if Harald Hardrada had had a few less drinks, Amartya Sen would be writing in Norwegian today? You spoil all the fun.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 6:11 PM
In honor of the thread, just moved the Texas Troubadour Box Set (1st 6 albums) over to my playlist in order. I usually shuffle and so only hear a song once in a blue moon and don't know him that well.
Or should I listen to the first two records three times? Am open to suggestions.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 8:11 PM
Bob -- is this Ernie Tubb of whom you are speaking? Or some other Texas Troubador?
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 8:16 PM
Ah -- never mind -- I see Mr. Van Zandt is also called the Texas Troubador. Sorry about the misunderstanding.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 8:18 PM
(Ernie Tubb is the real Texas Troubador.)
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 8:21 PM
Is there, in the entire corpus of Coetzee, a single character who combines moral excellence, or even basic decency, with power, effectiveness and initiative? Just asking...
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 9:40 PM
Elizabeth Costello. The narrator in Waiting For The Barbarians, in the second half of the book. Lucy in Disgrace -- she gets raped, but I don't think that's cause to question her effectiveness or initiative. I've only read those three books, but that's one character in each.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-19-05 11:11 PM
Elizabeth Costello -- at least in the Tanner lecture version --is not exactly what I had in mind as *effective/powerful*. She lectures people, sure, and is respected (?) in anacademic world, but she feels overwhelmed by the indifference of people to the 'holocaust' she sees around her. Is the novel different?
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 12-20-05 4:52 AM
I'd say, in as much as a professional writer can be effective/powerful, Elizabeth Costello is effective/powerful (though we don't have access to her actual work, and can't say whether she's any good or not). She is powerful in her personal interactions. She gets her way. In her lectures, she says what she wants to say. We also get glimpses of her younger self, who was very willful.
I guess you could say that the novel is agnostic as to whether Elizabeth Costello is "effective." In the end, she is stuck in hell, or purgatory. I think the novel questions whether the novel itself is an effective medium for conveying ideas, or anything. So in that sense, maybe I rushed to call her effective. But she is powerful, so that's one for two.
Her sister, the nun, is both effective and powerful. She is as strong-willed as Elizabeth, and what she's doing seems to be working.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-20-05 8:56 AM
's okay, i'm back.
::But I don't think we're denying that they're parallel (but what the parallelism means is at issue), and she's clearly a symbol, if you believe in symbolism. And what happens to her is also true: it's satisfying for black South Africans, after years of horrible suffering and emasculation, and the rape of their women, to rape white women. But I don't think that you can get out of all that the notion that Coetzee thinks that what happens to Lucy is in any way right.
to ogged's point:
Lucy (if you look at the text) describes her own situation as a "payment" (the narrator says "reparation" I believe). Lucy is willing to turn herself into a figure bearing the weight of white guilt or black demands for reparation. That's a question of psychology (is it believable or not that she does it?) The transformation of the narrator into someone who gets her logic, and thinks it might work as a symbolic means of making south africa a livable place again, ethically, for white South Africans -- that somehow both groups will be able to live together in the future thanks to this symbolic logic where Lucy's body is the "payment" the surrounding farmers receive -- is Coetzee's way of setting up this symbolic logic as a possible way of adjustment to life in a new south africa, or a reading of that adjustment (for those of us who aren't South African).
It's not a question of whether Coetzee thinks it's "right" or "wrong" that she got raped. (Even if I didn't think it was useless to speculate on authorial intentions, I would say the novel is ipso facto a genre that prizes ambiguity and moral complexity, and in that sense Coetzee has written a successful novel. It's Wood's argument too: the novel as a literary form has saved Coetzee from being too schematic.)
However, it IS a question as to whether Coetzee is setting up this rape, once it's happened, as a way of imaginatively righting a wrong situation - creating a symbolic "repayment" - so that life can go forward in this community. Does this rape, and Lucy's acceptance and forgiveness of it, work? Can it create this watershed, be a correction for the past - not on the level of individual personal ethics ("should they have raped her" - obviously; no) but on the level of symbolism for the community?
Because he's a good novelist, Coetzee presents you with counterevidence as well as evidence. However, I think he does definitely present this as a working possibility - that the rape (and de facto marriage of Lucy to the black farmer - remember, that is forced on her too, and she bears a mixed-race child from the union that will live in the new community and new nation) could be the cathartic event that makes living together in the new South Africa possible.
The symbolic logic: gang-rape of the white daughter of the landowner (communal action of violence), her marriage to the black overseer, and the mixed-race baby is a "righting" of the previous situation (the historical violence against the segregated, subjugated blacks). Symbol: an individual (or really, just her body: a material object) standing in for a larger non-material entity (the history of black slavery and servitude in South Africa, and its reversal through uprising).
You can agree or disagree with me about whether or not this is story, and subtext, that is interesting and provocative and one that you like seeing Coetzee explore, or whether it makes for a fantasy of nationhood and race relations that you would rather not experience vicariously or pass along to others, because it's not your taste. But you can't seriously dispute that this symbolic logic is going on in the text.
And that's just a hermeneutical observation, devoid for the moment of politics - those would be an addition not made here.)
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 12-20-05 9:49 AM
and, super-quickly (oy vey!):
the parallelism: both the narrator father and his daughter Lucy are described as experiencing "disgrace" - a word that resonates several times this way in the text. Since it's the title of the novel, that sets them up in parallel positions in a very prominent way: two characters who seem very different and do not understand each other but come to some mutual recognition of a commonality.
The commonality seems to be a transformative redemptive movement - the father's predicated on the daughter - and once again I suggest "Breaking the Waves" as a good intertext.
the second parallelism I didn't cite as much but is one of the reasons Coetzee's novel is interesting, not a political pamphlet (which I haven't ever claimed!). Here it is in schematic form: the narrator, a father, who commits an act which he later comes to see as rape of his much younger student vs. the gang-rape of Lucy, his daughter, who inherits the political situation in south africa, who will find a way (through the rape and birth of the child conceived during it) to continue living on the south african land.
See the structure coetzee set up, which he goes on to clothe with his spare prose? It's too bad i can't do columns and outline it here.
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 12-20-05 10:10 AM
I give up on this, mmf. I concede that Coetzee is playing with themes about how whites and blacks can coexist in south africa's future, and what it will require of them. But I don't find any of it offensive, for the reason that I don't think he ever condones the rapes. He sees them as horrible acts, and the issue is, how do you deal with these horrible acts? Whatever symbolism there is in the book, I don't think it changes that reading.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-20-05 10:49 AM
i think the problem is that you are reading my comments with the idea: "mmf is trying to tell me that Coetzee is offensive and that he condones rape."
and i'm not... it's true that i came into this conversation by saying i don't like the book. i still don't. but an evaluative reaction (good, bad) is different from a hermeneutic one (talking about the book's formal structure; the repetition of words or acts; the accumulation of subtexts of meaning).
and i do think one of the things Coetzee is putting out there is the idea of Lucy's gang-rape as a form of reparation that paves the way for a new future of living together without segregation and makes the living together possible. Lucy invests the rape with that meaning - a self-sacrifice which is "payment," which somehow redresses historic grievances. at first we (with the narrator) don't understand, or even think it's crazy and then gradually are encouraged to understand it more and more, to see it as working this way, to see that as positive, even redemptive.
it's fiction, so coetzee chose the plot - chose the events that the narrative takes as given - it could easily have been something different - and the basis of literary criticism is that choices are not arbitrary but instead get interpreted.
the above is disturbing. you can still like the book, of course -- good books are meant to unsettle you after all! But it's important to look straight at what the text of this novel is doing.
that's all! and i'm sorry i used the word "symbol" or "symbolic logic"; they have very precise meanings in lit crit (as does "allegory," and in this context the fact that Wood uses it means he is being even more critical of Coetzee than I am) -- but I think that when you guys hear them, you think "general fuzziness" instead of "sign coinciding with thing signified."
okay, back to your usual programming.
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 12-20-05 3:26 PM
I'm just not sure what to do with this. You say that the words "symbol" and "allegory" are precise. They are. But I don't think Disgrace contains any precise symbols or allegories. What is the rape a symbol of, exactly, under your reading? What is Lucy a symbol of? What about the narrator? I don't think Coetzee uses precise symbols, always meaning one thing or another, in Disgrace.
I'll admit that Lucy makes the justification that you attribute to her. Are we supposed to agree with her? I don't know. I don't think the text asks us to agree or disagree with her, but merely to think about what she says.
Writers make decisions, and by all means we should analyze them, but I have a hard time coming to the conclusion that Lucy's rape was payment for her father's crimes (or the white man's crimes) based on the sequential relationship of the two occurrences. Also, I have a hard time believing that Coetzee meant Lucy as a mouthpiece for his own allegorical or symbolic messages, as opposed to a character, with her own thoughts and ideas.
Yes, I'm troubled by her decision. I don't require that I not be troubled by it. But I probably don't approach novels in the same way that you and James Woods do.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 12-20-05 4:04 PM