'another, An Other Mode Of Thinking': The Implications Of Literature In J.m Coetzee's Disgrace.

'Another, An Other Mode of Thinking' : The Implications of Literature in J.M Coetzee's Disgrace.

'Literary activity always bears a more or less significant relation to politics' (Vaughan 51). This central premise of Vaughan's 'Literature and Politics' is true, perhaps even a truism, but more interesting is the subsequent suggestion that in certain situations, certain contexts, this relation is intensified, concentrated in such circumstances where 'politics in its narrow, or institutional sense operates under severe constraints' (52); in South Africa for instance. As a Nobel Laureate and winner of multiple domestic and international literary awards, J.M. Coetzee, 'one of the most acclaimed writers of the late twentieth century both in South Africa and around the world' (McDonald 303), has always worked under these potentially suffocating political conditions. Aware of literature's necessary relationship with politics and history, Coetzee nevertheless has reservations about the balance of power in that relationship. In 'The Novel Today', an address delivered at a cultural festival in Cape Town 1987, Coetzee explicitly sets up his own art as a writer as 'a rival to history' (3). For him, the novel has been robbed of its identity, subsumed under history and politics to which it bears 'self-evidently a secondary relation' (2). He continues to defend the purity of literature, or 'storytelling', which should never become merely 'a message with a. rhetorical or aesthetic covering' (4). In Disgrace the covering and the core are inseperable. Although predominantly noted for its 'unbearable realism' (Enright, 19) the book also questions the value of literature in a time of political and social upheaval. Few contemporary debates have incited as much controversy as those over the literary canon (Leitch, 1877), and from the publication of Dusklands in 1974 to that speech in 2003 and beyond, Coetzee has periodically engaged in the debate. Having met the subject head-on in Foe (1986) and The Master of Petersburg (1994), Coetzee continued to explore the canon after the fall of apartheid and on into the twenty-first century. In David Lurie, Coetzee presents a protagonist who is not only an artist, but a man whose life is constructed from literature, and Coetzee's extensive borrowings from, allusions to, and use of canonical Western literature in the novel are many and various. Exploration of these themes in Disgrace should result in some illuminating conclusions on the value of literature as literature, as opposed to politically or historically efficacious writing. Unlike Nadine Gordimer or André Brink, Coetzee has never chosen to be a critical commentator, and his non-fiction publications are almost exclusively on literary subjects. From these publications, and his novels, interviews and lectures, emerges a writer less interested in the socio-political than the literary. Whilst he recognises that the two are to a certain extent inseparable, for Coetzee it is the qualities exclusively displayed by literature which make novels worth reading, rereading, arguing about, and awarding prizes. With so much criticism of Disgrace and Coetzee in general having been based on the assumption of their relevance to the political situation in South Africa, it is necessary to understand those situations: firstly with an overview of the writer's position under apartheid; then post-apartheid.

Apartheid:

During the apartheid era literature acquired a particular importance in shaping international understandings of the South African situation. As a result, this situation acquired a 'notorious centrality in the contemporary political and ethical imagination which [gave] its writers a special claim on the world's attention' (Attridge 132). Coetzee's first novels were published at an uncertain crossroads in South Africa's history. The increased activity of ANC and PAC militias were met by the Government's stiffening of the Terrorism Act, which allowed the indefinite detention of suspects in solitary confinement (Davenport and Saunders 448). Tensions resulted in the Soweto Crisis of June 1976, when an illegal student march near Johannesburg was ended by police gunfire, with resulting loss of life. Soweto sent shockwaves throughout the country, causing a 'chain of revolts.which continued spasmodically until 1980' (ibid. 449) At such a time the judgement and production of art were necessarily governed by its effectiveness in affecting real change. It was a literary world suspicious of anything 'hermetic, self-referential, formally inventive or otherwise distant from.the realist tradition (ibid. 1). Unsurprisingly, Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country (1977), with its surreal setting, numbered paragraphs, and unreliable narrator, was considered 'too overtly modernist' (ibid. ix). Instead of confronting apartheid explicitly, Coetzee did so implicitly; it is built into his narrative landscapes. According to Richard Peck, Coetzee is a writer who 'shows no interest in the practical shape that political processes take' yet, he continues, for whom 'everything is politics (6). Peck, in a book subtitled White Prose and Politics in Apartheid South Africa, reserves a solitary paragraph for Coetzee, arguably South Africa's most celebrated white prose writer. In defence of this scanty appraisal, Peck cites Coetzee's 'abstraction and intellectualisation.[which] render the particulars unrecognisable' (6). Certainly these characteristics set Coetzee apart from contemporary proponents of the dominant realist aesthetic like Gordimer, Brink and Breytenbach. Coetzee did not join any writers' group during the apartheid era (McDonald, Police 207), and, whilst defusing the censors, his techniques incited fellow writers and critics who increasingly sought relevance. Lewis Nkosi, literary polymath and repeated victim of banning under apartheid's Suppression of Communism Act, demanded that writers 'strike a balance between life as it is lived and life as it is intellectually and metaphysically ordered into a formalized artistic expression. In short the pressing social problems order the writer to be relevant'. (105) It is no coincidence that Coetzee received more criticism for Foe (1986), his most overt examination of the role of canonical Western literature and most intertextual book, than for anything else. It is a novelist's novel, completely disregarding Nkosi's call to arms: 'those who search in Foe for relevant references to South Africa, or even to the world, as it is today, will search in vain.' (de Lange 109). One reviewer thought the book a mere 'literary pastiche' (McGrath); another found it 'a static and anaemic affair' (Furbank 995). Foe rewrites/unwrites not just any canonical text, but the canonical colonial text. In a world where 'every novelist and every critic or theorist of the European novel notes its institutional character' (Said 75), Edward W. Said locates Robinson Crusoe at the dark heart of that institution, dryly noting that 'certainly not accidentally is it about a European who creates a fiefdom for himself on a distant, non-European island' (ibid. xiii). Coetzee's rewriting of Crusoe is a multi-layered, cryptic affair, with narrator, author, and characters becoming entangled in what the Daniel Defoe character calls a 'maze of doubting' (Foe 135) . The danger inherent in such rewritings is that they tend to reinforce the centrality of Western writing by default. This is a particular danger for Coetzee, whose avant-garde style and concerns with the human condition identify him with, in the words of Peter McDonald, 'a cosmopolitan literary heritage that extended from Joyce to Beckett, via Kafka and Faulkner' (Police 306). With South Africa experiencing a breakdown of public order following the Government's controversial constitutional ideas, and with the country just entering an official state of emergency (Davenport and Saunders 496), writing a book based on a seminal colonial text, written in pseudo-eighteenth century English was largely considered irresponsible. Even the author himself admits, with characteristic understatement, that the 'climate into which Foe was launched, at least in South Africa.was unpropitious.' (Coetzee and Attwell 146)

Post-Apartheid

With the fall of apartheid the responsibility of writers shifted significantly. In 1989 the writer and jurist Albie Sachs delivered a paper at an ANC seminar, in which he proposed that 'our members should be banned from saying that culture is a weapon of struggle' (Attwell Harlow 1). Where before 'resistance' was the watchword, suddenly it was restitution. In the wake of the so-called "miracle" of the South African transition, the pressure to bind together the new nation, to 'take its people decisively from a traumatised past to a reconstructed future' (ibid. 2) was enormous. The publication of Disgrace (1999) came at an especially tender time for the embryonic New South Africa. As Gerald Kaufman enthused on announcing the novel's Booker Prize victory, 'it takes us through the twentieth century into a new century in which the source of power is shifting away from Western Europe' (McDonald, Effects 322). This notional pressure of its being a millennial book, poised at the dawn of a new age for South Africa and the world, added to the more real felt fact that, on 2nd June 1999, South African voters went to the polls for their 'second substantially representative general election' (Davenport and Saunders 588). Coetzee's relationship with the New South Africa was at best fractious, at worst one of mutual mistrust. Coetzee's attitude can be glimpsed in an essay he wrote in 1999 about the 1995 Rugby World Cup, an iconic event which saw the return of the South African team from sporting exile. For Coetzee, though, the tournament was ' a month-long orgy of chauvinism and mime-show' (Stranger 351), geared towards perpetuating 'The master metaphor.[of] Archbishop Desmond Tutu's 'Rainbow People'' (ibid. 352). The article is brutal: not even the tournament's anthem ('saccharine and sonorous vacuity') escapes Coetzee's censure. For Coetzee, the space of the literary was never more suitable for use as a building block for the New South Africa than it had been as a 'weapon' in the anti-apartheid struggle (McDonald, Police 210). In Disgrace Coetzee brings the power of literature to bear on the contemporary situation, rather than the other way around.

Disgrace

Representations of artists were rare in South African literature during apartheid (Attridge 25). The more pressing, more horrifying preoccupations of state brutality and world exclusion meant that writers' concerns with their own profession - with the notable exception of censorship - tended to be suppressed. It is all the more unusual, therefore, that Coetzee should have created such a succession of books and characters preoccupied with artistic production. His first two novels, Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country explore in diary form the authority and reliability of narrative voice, while Foe (1986) and The Master of Petersburg (1994) have as their respective protagonists versions of Daniel Defoe and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. At times Coetzee's roles as novelist and critic seem to blur into one as he imbues his novels with highbrow literary references, repeatedly questioning the writer's authority 'at a time when most novelists were concerned with questions of political and military power and resistance to it' (Attridge 27). David Lurie is both the subject and the object of Disgrace, 'both victim and agent of destruction' (Attwell, Coetzee 1). Whilst to some extent he seals his own disgraceful fate, he is also a tragic hero figure, floundering in the tide of history, a lone voice of tradition in a changing world . Lurie is a man constructed from the language and literature of the past, and as such is out of touch with his present reality. This 'feeling of being out of date, of having been born into too late an epoch' is, to Coetzee, a defining trope of TS Eliot's poetry, 'from 'Prufrock' to 'Gerontion'' (Coetzee, Stranger 7). The attempt to understand this feeling, and to breath into it meaning, is part of the enterprise of Coetzee's poetry and criticism. This, for Coetzee, is a not uncommon feeling amongst 'colonials' (whom Eliot calls 'provincials'): 'struggling to match their inherited culture to their daily experience.' (ibid. 7) David Lurie is just such a figure. The reality of living in post-apartheid South Africa gradually encroaches on Lurie's sequestered world; daily experience clashes with inherited culture. Periodically Coetzee hints at the real state of the nation through place names: Lucy's closest town is 'Salem', a name redolent with witch-hunting connotations ; and Lurie has his burns treated at 'Settler's Hospital'. Likewise, signs of political unrest emerge occasionally, and are always negative. After three months away from Cape Town, upon his return Lurie notices that 'in that time the shanty settlements.[had] crossed the highway and spread east of the airport' (Coetzee, Disgrace (hereafter D) 175); arriving at the Animal Welfare League, Lurie is immediately surrounded by 'children all around him, begging for money or just staring' (D 80). More disturbing is the chain of references to police incompetence: 'the police are not going to save you' (D 100), says the neighbour Ettinger darkly after Lucy's rape; Lurie plans to claim on his car insurance 'Assuming [the insurance company] isn't bankrupt by now because of all the car-theft in this country' (D 137); after the police have found the wrong car, Lucy voices her realisation that the rapists 'aren't going to be caught, not with the police in the state they are in' (D 155). By accumulating these snapshots, Coetzee creates a pervasive climate of crime, which accurately portray a time when apartheid's legacy remained evident in 'a warped criminal justice system which.seem[ed] incapable of dealing with ordinary crime.' (Attwell Harlow 2). However, For David Attwell, focusing on the novel's political ramifications will inevitably result in 'an overheated discussion about what is the least complex - and arguably, least interesting - area of the novel's performance: its socially mimetic function.' (Race, 332) One scene with an undoubted real-life political parallel is Lurie's interview by his colleagues. Here the interrogatory 'Committee' represents Desmond Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that most striking example of the tension between the apartheid past and the present (Attwell Harlow 12). Established in June 1994, the TRC was a fact-finding, truth-telling experiment, aiming to ease the transition from apartheid and promote reconciliation (Davenport and Saunders 690). While many have read the scene as Coetzee's own assessment of the TRC, readers of Coetzee, as Attwell tells us, 'will have become wary of too easy a linkage between historical events and their fictional reprisals in his novels' (Coetzee 865). In fact the scene is pertinent as the latest manifestation of the decline of Lurie's subject and, accordingly, his self-esteem. Early on we learn that Cape Town university College has become Cape Technical University, the name changed in the same 'great rationalisation' which made professor of modern languages David Lurie into David Lurie 'adjunct professor of communications', one of the 'rationalised personnel' (D 3); technical terms which, written in Lurie's voice, read with an unmistakable sneer. The jargon is oppressive. Here is an underestimated cause for Lurie's fall; such technical, dry nonsense cannot nourish his Romantic sensibility. Tellingly, the repeated metaphor for Lurie's life is 'the desert of the week' (D 1), then 'as featureless as a desert' (D 11): not just dry and monotonous, but lifeless. This necessitates for Lurie the oases of his (quasi-)romantic encounters with the prostitute Soraya, and his student Melanie. Crucially, both these women are introduced with an emphasis on their exoticism: Soraya has 'honey-brown skin' and is listed by Discreet Escorts 'under 'Exotic'' (D 7); Melanie has 'wide, almost Chinese cheekbones, large, dark eyes' (D 11). Lurie is therefore positioned as the conquering European, who appropriates two oriental women, one for money and the other against her will . The appropriation of women and culture are explicitly aligned when, after a failed seduction attempt, Lurie regretfully realises that 'The pentameter, whose cadence once served so well to oil [his] words, now only estranges' (D 16). To justify this role as the culturally liberating and conquering European, Lurie equates himself with writers about whom he has written:

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), nature-poet. David Lurie (1945-?), commentator upon, and disgraced disciple of, William Wordsworth. (D 46)

So Lurie views his position as a Romantic as somehow legitimising his sexual conquests, and vice versa. He compares his affairs to those of 'Emma Bovary, coming home sated, glazen-eyed, from an afternoon of reckless fucking' (D 5). Even in his darkest moments, he evaluates his life through classic literature. Upon returning to Cape Town, aware that his credit will soon dry up, and his will become 'the life of the superannuated scholar, without hope, without prospect': Lurie, echoing Byron, calls this realisation 'The end of roaming' (D 175). Later, in another trough of despondency following an argument with his ex-wife, Lurie thinks of his situation in terms of Yeats: 'No country, this, for old men' (D 190). Later still, he justifies his dalliance of Melanie in the words of William Blake: 'Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires' (D 69). This may represent the more absurd side of Lurie's Romanticism, but as Attridge points out, in Disgrace 'the connection between the aesthetic and the erotic is profound' (37).