The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  In Disgrace, obviously, the relation between the author and the protagonist doesn’t have the same ostensible frame as in Boyhood and Youth: although Coetzee was in his late fifties when he wrote the novel and made David Lurie fifty-two, that gap wouldn’t justify the same adult scrutiny of youthful difference, removed across a distance of years and experience. However, the prose patterns in the narrative of Disgrace suggest that the position of intimate surveillance developed in Boyhood gave him the leverage he wanted for the treatment of his protagonist.2 We aren’t given any alternative secure perspective from which to ‘know’ Lurie, but we are able to scrutinise the edges of the knowledge his temperament makes available to him. First of all, most straightforwardly, other characters within the novel comment critically on his perspective: even those who are fairly clearly set up for critical distance, such as Lurie’s colleagues at the tribunal, may be allowed their space of truthfulness around his, divergent from his. Manas Mathabane is reasonable and even generous in his attempt to resolve the problem: Lurie in refusing Manas’s solution (a written apology) is both principled and stubborn, quixotic. Other characters have even more light to shed, in their reported commentaries on Lurie’s actions: Melanie, Lucy, Rosalind and Bev Shaw (Lucy’s friend who runs the veterinary clinic where Lurie helps out) give us in what they say and do a surplus of clues for interpreting Lurie, beyond what he thinks about himself. There’s an illuminating moment when Lucy breaks out against him, late on the novel. ‘David,’ she says, ‘can we have some relief from that terrible irony of yours?’ He says he doesn’t know what she means. ‘Of course you do. For years you used it against me when I was a child, to mortify me.’ Lurie doesn’t pick up or react to the comment in what follows, even though he’s never given us any hint beforehand of having anything but the tenderest relationship with his daughter as a child. It’s as if it isn’t an insight he can actively use, in order to know himself, to bypass temperament. Only it’s scrupulously notated in the writing, it lies inert but not ineffective as part of the sum of narrative.

  It isn’t only in the dramatised responses of the other characters that the narrative preserves its crucial sceptical distance from Lurie, transcends the given of his temperament; the scepticism is also there in how Lurie presents himself, so to speak, to his own awareness. Progressively his initial position, inside the self-contained tidy life of a man who ‘thought he had solved the problem of sex rather well’, is eroded; he’s forced into a humiliating limelight, exposed even to the flashing cameras of the press, to having his private, subtly chosen vocabulary for his own discriminations (the women ‘enriched’ his life) stolen and blurted in grotesque headlines. When the crucial second disaster of the novel unrolls – he and Lucy are attacked in her farmhouse – he is helpless to save her or even to try to fight the intruders off; they lock him in the lavatory, like the old maids in the song (he makes the comparison himself). After the attack, he has to go around with his head in an absurd white bandage which he calls his skull-cap, because the attackers poured petrol over him and set light to it. Something in Lurie – something one might not have suspected in the secretive, superior man of the beginning of the novel – embraces the emblems of his humiliation. He seems almost to relish how his bandage makes him ridiculous, makes him a clown; how it undercuts whatever comments he delivers, makes his utmost seriousness somehow helplessly comical: all this paralleled by the crisis in his sexual life, where without warning the eros he has counted on has transformed into farce. Everything conspires – the novel conspires – to take the authority and dignity of the man to bits: this is the disgrace of the title. He lives out in a sense the role of the holy fool (again, reminding us of the Dostoevsky who matters to Coetzee so much): adrift, wise and absurd inseparably, making difficulties for others, unsettling them not from a position of imperturbable truth, but out of instability, because his frame of interpretation can’t be made to fit the reality he moves through. The scene where Lurie kneels to ask forgiveness of Melanie’s embarrassed mother is particularly, uncomfortably, Dostoevskian: we can’t know whether to admire the gesture or be appalled by it.

  While he’s staying with Lucy in the Eastern Cape, Lurie’s house in Cape Town is broken into, his books at the university are packed away in boxes by his successor: there’s no place for him in his old life any more, its categories and habits have closed against him. He moves to rented rooms in Grahamstown to be near Lucy, who is pregnant, carrying the baby of one of the men who raped her; he spends his days at Bev Shaw’s veterinary surgery, helping her put unwanted animals to sleep, or working on the opera that will never be performed. Characteristically Coetzee makes it impossible to read any grandly resonant redemptive schema into this new, reduced life of Lurie’s; its accommodations are minimal and provisional. It is impossible for him to romanticise, writing his opera in Bev’s yard, his ‘nest of sorts’, where little boys peer over the wall, seeing ‘a mad old man who sits among the dogs singing to himself’. He knows he could never explain to them, ‘or to their parents, to D Village, what Teresa and her lover have done to deserve being brought back to this world’. In his subject, ‘it is not the erotic that is calling to him after all, nor the elegiac, but the comic’. Teresa suffers from her time of the month, she plays her mandolin: ‘plink-plunk, squawks the banjo in the desolate yard in Africa’. Again, there’s something almost triumphant in how Lurie situates himself at the position of maximum absurdity, refusing either to deceive himself over the value of the work he’s doing, or to give it up. Sex with plain Bev on the surgery floor is a comic counterpoint to the passion and rapturous agonies he suffered over Melanie; he resigns himself to it, and then, after a while, to no sex at all.

  After he and Bev have put the animals to sleep, Lurie takes it upon himself to see that their corpses are disposed of with dignity at the hospital incinerator (the men who work there break their rigid limbs with shovels to make them fit). He knows that the idea of dignity is absurd, in such a context, and that what he does makes no difference to anyone, least of all the dead dogs; but he persists in the absurdity (as with the opera) because it’s a sort of minimum rehearsal of what he is, of what’s left, after the succession of his humiliations and unravellings. He does it, he thinks, ‘for his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing’; although, in the novel’s perpetual restless movement through assertion into doubt, by the end of the page the confidence of that has resolved into his merely saving the honour of corpses ‘because there is no one else stupid enough to do it’. That diminished restatement doesn’t slyly nudge us to think otherwise, to think well of him: we’ve been made too sharply aware that in the context of this South Africa with its third-world poverty, its bloody and divisive history, its deep cultural damage, his concern for the dogs’ dignity is compromised before it begins.

  This is part of the novel’s ruthless shearing away of the successive layers and versions of what Lurie thinks he is, and how he thinks he can live: all his awareness, including the age-old lament for the loss of his youth, is acted out against a background of politics and history that strips it of consoling meaning. The attack on the house and Lucy’s rape are paralysing for Lucy and Lurie. The attackers can’t be read into any schema in which they appear from beyond the boundaries of the world of the book to wreak their havoc and are then re-absorbed into the darkness, allowing meaning to be re-made behind them. These attackers don’t, to begin with, disappear: it is peculiarly horrifying that one of the three returns to haunt them, not as a nightmarish vision but as a mundane, daily, domesticated presence, hanging around the farm. He’s a peculiar, angry boy, related through unfathomable networks to Petrus, who works for Lucy and who has ambitions for his farm that borders on and begins to absorb and overtake hers. The boy even has a name – Pollux; he peers through the bathroom window at Lucy, and threatens that he’ll kill them all when Lurie catches him and attacks him. What are they to do, about his persisting, exaspe
rating, threatening presence; about the violent act that can’t be borne and yet remains unaddressed, undealt with? In the South African context the question can’t but resonate beyond itself, open up bewilderingly and disablingly onto a whole history of violence unaddressed. Angrily Lurie insists that there must still be an ethical context in which to condemn the crime; stubbornly Lucy carries the rapists’ baby, submits herself more or less to whatever Petrus advises, submits even to the continuing presence of the boy. Lurie wants her to leave and go to live with her mother in Holland; even though a sustainable future for her on the farm is almost – almost – unimaginable, Lucy insists on staying, amidst all her sorrows (she’s profoundly troubled and damaged, naturally, by the rape – ‘I am a dead person and I do not know yet what will bring me back to life’). It’s as if such a future could only be lived into, in the body that stubbornly and against common sense persists – weeding, planting things, growing; it’s not available to Lurie’s intellectual processing.

  Again, Coetzee doesn’t cast Lurie as the wise interpreter of this tangled nexus of violence and race history. He’s meant rather to blunder through it, sometimes eloquent, sometimes clumsy, but never actually effecting any resolution, or even achieving any clear understanding of what happened. Lucy isn’t set up as more ‘right’ than him, either; simply, her arguments have the same weight in the writing as his (and Bev Shaw’s have their weight, too, and Lurie’s second wife’s). In one of their discussions Lucy suggests a continuum between the violence of rape and all male sex desire (solitary now, she has been in a lesbian partnership); the writing doesn’t offer that as all-explaining, but in the context of Lurie’s relationship with Melanie it can’t be entirely dismissed either. Like other explanations, it’s crucially present in the novel without actually underwriting all its contents. Lurie becomes deeply suspicious of Petrus, even imagining at times a scenario in which Petrus conspired with the attackers, to try to drive Lucy off the farm, or at least to make her acknowledge her need to come in under his protection. There’s no satisfactory denouement offered in the novel, where this scenario is confirmed one way or another, or where questions of responsibility, or punishment, or reparation are seized or sorted out. Every time Lurie talks to Petrus, we hear both men deploying frames of reference that are all but impenetrable to one another. Actually we can read round Lurie’s suspicion and hostility to hear that Petrus’s version of events, too, has its own cohesion and its own ethic – the rapist-boy belongs in somebody’s family (‘I also look after my child’), there are other ways of controlling violence than bringing in the police (‘I also say it is bad. It is bad. But it is finish.’). Lucy, Petrus implies, must learn anyway that it’s impossible for her to survive on the farm as a woman alone, in the circumstances of the new South Africa; she needs to come in under the protection of a man, of a family, yield to a different way of doing things. Lurie, burning with the shame of his failure to protect his daughter, feels that Petrus is trying to replace him in his role as father; then he’s appalled, derisory, when Petrus offers himself as Lucy’s husband, cutting Lurie out doubly, consigning him to impotent irrelevance. Lucy negotiates warily, tentatively, with what she can manage of Petrus’s version of the future, but Lurie can’t and won’t hear any truth in the words the other man speaks.

  The novel doesn’t make it possible for us to know ‘who’s right’: the truth isn’t so easily available inside it. Lucy insists that her father can’t grasp what the experience of the rape has meant to her. ‘There are things you just don’t understand.’ Bev Shaw reiterates: ‘you don’t understand, you weren’t there.’ Lurie insists: he could imagine it, couldn’t he? He makes up a version of the rape for himself: he can imagine horror, he’s ‘never been afraid of following a thought down its winding track’. The novel can imagine anything, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? And yet this novel insists equally on the importance of what it can’t know: preserves as inviolable the space, for instance, in which the actual rape happens, which Lucy insists that we can’t ever enter. In one of his literature classes in Capetown, Lurie reads just this argument about the interaction of imagination and actual witness into passages from Wordsworth’s Prelude.3 He reads Wordsworth as suggesting that revelation depends upon a balance between sense-perception and ideas: ‘the sense-image … as a means toward stirring or activating the idea that lies buried more deeply in the soil of memory … we climb [mountains] in the wake of the poets, hoping for one of those revelatory Wordsworthian moments we have all heard about … But moments like that will not come unless the eye is half turned towards the great archetypes of the imagination we carry within us.’ This is relevant, in its place in the novel, to Lurie’s obsession with Melanie, where the passionately desired real sensual contact fuses with poetic archetypes (flower, flame, goddess). But the idea is larger than that, too: it becomes the problem of truth and knowledge in the whole novel, it becomes even the method of the novel, in its perpetual movement to speculative thought and imaginative interpretation through the precisely specifying realism of the story.

  If anything, the balance in the novel between the two elements of thought swings, as Lurie’s disgrace deepens, towards the power of witness, of the unanswerable sense experience: ‘you don’t understand, you weren’t there’. Lurie’s imagination, the language in which he reads and interprets, is often overwhelmed by the reality surrounding him, forcing itself upon him; under its pressure, for example, the original elegiac conception for his opera reshapes into comedy. How could he, really, persuade ‘the inhabitants of D Village’ that Teresa Guiccioli’s love for Byron mattered as an idea; this fragment left over from a lost romantic Europe, absurd, extravagant, indefensible in the face of poverty, sickness, violence? And yet it doesn’t stop mattering, to him; rehearsing it in some sense he practises what he is, he can’t do anything else. The novel itself will test the value of the idea, haltingly and incompletely, trying out the intimations of dream and desire against its witness to real things, not arriving finally at any place that pretends to finalise the experience inside it. The case this novel argues for its art isn’t, in the end, a transcendent one: the novel can’t surpass the opacity of the mysterious life that surrounds it. Its aspiration isn’t to that kind of mastery, anyway: rather, to submit to becoming the music in which the conjunction of the dream and the real expresses itself. ‘So this is art!’ Lurie thinks, at work on his opera, ‘and this is how it does its work! How strange! How fascinating!’ ‘He is held in the music itself, in the flat tinny slap of the banjo strings, the voice that strains to soar away from the ludicrous instrument but is continually reined back, like a fish on a line.’

  In the early 90s, in the book of his essays Doubling the Point, Coetzee talked about the ‘pathos’ of the postmodernist narrative position and its scepticism about the possibilities of representation; its writers, he suggests, are ‘like children shut in the playroom, the room of textual play, looking out wistfully through the bars at the enticing world of the grownups, one that we have been instructed to think of as the mere phantasmal world of realism but that we stubbornly can’t help thinking of as the real.4 Through the years of his extraordinary narrative experiments – Heart of the Country, Foe, Age of Iron and all the others – he has written himself out of the playroom into a grown-up new realism that perhaps has its culmination in Disgrace (and in Boyhood and Youth); a complex realism that doesn’t discount the experiments that came before but depends on them.5 Every signifying gesture in this novel, every sentence, is sprung in a tension between witness and awareness of itself as witness.6 The effect of this pressure, which might have been disabling, is instead a stark simplification, a new nakedness; it’s perhaps somehow this nakedness that made it possible for Disgrace to step, as it were, outside of its own temperament – erudite, intellectual, difficult of approach – and cross over to reach so many readers. The achievement is of the order of what Lurie, writing his opera, allows himself to hope for (and in superbly Byronic language): ‘that somewher
e from amidst the welter of sound there will dart up, like a bird, a single authentic note of immortal longing’.

  Notes

  1 Coetzee, Doubling the Point, ed. David Attwell (Harvard University Press, 1992), p.252.

  2 Of course Coetzee has in all his novel writing preserved careful narrative distances from his protagonists; we don’t expect from him comfortable authorial identifications with a protagonist-narrator transparently interpreting events. What’s newly striking in Disgrace isn’t the sceptical distance: it’s actually the confessional closeness.

  3 Even before Lurie’s life is disrupted, there’s an element of comic absurdity in these classes where his students sit blank, unmoved, before his eloquence. The mockery isn’t all one way, Lurie isn’t an inspiring teacher, he hasn’t adapted at all – that temperamental fatality – to the new cultural contexts his students come out of; he persists in offering them closed authoritative readings of the texts, rather than trying to open up any dialogue with it, or encouraging them to find their own ways in.