BOOK REVIEWS : DISGRACE -- BY J. M. COETZEE

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
--J. M. Coetzee

If you have deep love for extra beautiful literature, and if you have enough room for reading a novel twice, at least, then J M Coetzee has lot of things to offer. The winner of Nobel Prize in literature in the year 2003, J M Coetzee is a man of his own class, an engineer with his own set of tools. His novels are thick with real world and human miseries, at least up to the date he penned ‘Disgrace’. He had tried a novel technique of blending facts and fiction in Slow Man.

By ‘Disgrace’ he became the first novelist to pocket the Man Booker Prize twice. In ‘Disgrace’ he tries painting landscape of a country, South Africa, where the regime trading apartheid has just closed its shutters and people are yet to be adjusted to the climate change. They have a multitude of newly formed rules and the wings of the changed perception of their own.

Keeping the contemporary South African stage setting before his eyes, J M Coetzee writes symbolically about the altered atmosphere. In order to create a visual metaphor for what Coetzee sees, he uses the story of David Lurie, a professor in literature and his daughter Lucy who has transformed herself into a countrywoman. He superbly narrates how this countrywoman responds to the new challenges of her life in a distorted atmosphere. After going through a vagabond’s life and leaving the company of a lesbian friend behind, she rears dogs for sale and produces vegetables and flowers in her Eastern Cape farm.

THE PLOT: A STORY OF NATIONAL DISGRACE
The novel, with a linear plot, essentially starts when David Lurie enters into a corporeal act with one of his students. Caught in a fix, the student registers a complaint against him. In spite of his colleagues’ suggestions to deny and defend the allegations of having sex with his student, David accepts the allegations. Thus in becoming honest to his acts, he invites the obvious ouster from the job. There starts the life of disgrace.
After being disgraced, and while living at the farm owned by Lucy, he wakes up into another world. He encounters the world where people have to sacrifice most of their legitimate rights and have to compromise on seemingly odd issues. In the newly ‘liberated-from-apartheid South Africa’, the trees of old rules are razed out and the plants of new order are yet to be firmly rooted in. Before he settles on the ideas of why, at Lucy’s friend Bev’s veterinary hospital, the lives of the terminally ill dogs are ended by a fatal but relieving injection, some miscreants attack her daughter’s farm and she is gang raped. Lucy’s dogs shot dead; house looted; David’s car stolen. He lodges complains for his car; but Lucy denies registering complaint of the rape. It’s the cost of living on the land: that is what she believes. When her father tells her to “Sell up”, she refuses. Here David learns a chapter in parenthood. There comes a date when children start living without help of biblical cord, the parental assistance.

Lucy is more stable in her life, remaining attached with her own piece of land. In a way she responds more logically to the challenges of the life, in comparison of her desperate father who has frequented to prostitutes searching for the meaning of life. Her acceptance of the reality, in a strange way to bear a child of the neo-oppressor, reveals how women naturally get adjusted to the changed environment. Those who are unaware of South Africa's present may not be able to swallow the tough pill.

THE THREAD RUNNING THROUGH THE NOVEL

Here the novelist puts forward a question about when the disgrace starts. The protagonist enters sexual act with her student; it is not a rape per se. She is not a minor; she is not abducted; she is not subjected to any force. But the girl remains muted during the process; where David the protagonist enjoys himself by her young skin. Here the same thing is not perceived in the same sense. A man and a woman are required to see the ‘same thing’ in ‘same sense’, especially in sexual matters. And if not, and if the weaker partner, here the woman, feels cheated, the period of grace is over and the ‘disgrace’ starts.

Apart from this Coetzee narrates another type of ‘disgrace’, too. Growing under the apartheid-infected air of South Africa, he is addicted to write in allegorical ways. Coetzee has always looked at the modern subject matters through non-traditional glasses. The manner in which he transacts with our hearts is in no way a comfortable one. Nor it is conventional, too. He acts like a wild cat sitting on the chest of its prey. And every time, the cat leaves us spilling blood. However when the ‘Barbarians Are coming’ or the shadows of ‘Age of Iron’ are hovering over the characters of his novels, he honesty searches for a possible way-out for them. In ‘Disgrace’ he paints the picture of a different life; the life that the ‘whites’ of South Africa have to pull on.

After the fall of apartheid rules, the thinking of the local people changes. The natives start disliking the ‘holding of land’ by the ‘white’ people. Lucy the farmer, a white lady, has a servant, Petrus. He is a native. He now puts forward a strange proposal. If Lucy becomes his second wife, he believes, then her holdings would remain safe. The local influential leader and his men visit her house with a clear-cut design. They gang rape her. The lesson the rapists want to convey is simple: hand over our land; bear our children; and remain alive. They hate Lucy’s unencumbered ownership of a plough-able piece of land.

The country is virtually lawless in rural sides where David and his daughter reside. Such a spell of legal emptiness is agonizing; especially for a man like David. Coetzee narrates him as: ‘His temperament is not going to change; he is too old for that.’ In David’s South Africa, there is mass violation of the laws. Under such circumstances, one would find the road ahead darkening.

Literature provides us some light in the darkness. The great thinkers, and their writings, have upgraded the literature to the level of religion in secularized section of people. Keeping pace with this movement for providing primal education, Coetzee has carved out a striking example in ‘Disgrace’.

STYLE AND NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE

While reading Coetzee, humor would hardly fail in easing our strains, making our mind lighter. Had he been not a humorist as he is, he would have been branded as a rebellion for selecting the subjects of his writings. He might have found his place just beside Nelson Mandela. But he happens to be a writer, a warrior fighting with the arsenal of his words, the words flowing through his mighty pen. It’s the strongest part of the story that he does not allow the protagonist to run away when he had option to get away with the inquiry set up against him. He accepts what he did.

The visual metaphors used in narrating the scenes carry us at the place and in the time where the characters are struggling to live. At nowhere the narration seems very dramatic. The Lucy’s rape, an act of the highest insult a man can do to a woman, is conceived in the lines, which are emphatically convincing. The challenges the characters in ‘Disgrace’ face are just like ours, but their responses to these challenges are quite different. That is how the literature in general and a writer in particular provide us the light in the darkness, the darkness we are surrounded by.

The story telling technique, the art J M Coetzee is master of, makes us feeling immediately identified with the characters. He puts us in the midst of the happenings. The vivid description of college activities and the way in which students behave with their studies make us believe the scenes. They all look like the parts of our day-to-day life.

Coetzee’s novels are filled with irony and satire, entertaining the readers according to their intellectual heights. In the case of ‘Disgrace’, the thematic compulsions and perpetual happenings of sad events restrained him becoming an outright humorist. But he has counterbalanced it by putting lightweight words in the blank spaces lying between two sentences.

In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other. --J. M. Coetzee

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