J.M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative By Gillian Dooley

Nevertheless, he submits himself to “a state of disgrace from which it will not be easy to lift myself.… I am living it out from day to day, trying to accept disgrace as my state of being” (D 172).

So far, Disgrace has little to say directly about the politics of the new South Africa, where the novel is set. However, his daughter Lucy's stubborn resistance to reporting her rape by three black intruders or to taking any steps to guard against its recurrence certainly has a political aspect. She wants to stay on her farm, even though she expects that the rapists will return. “What if…that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too” (D 158). Her refusal to be prudent in someone else's terms, of course, parallels his, but as a father, he cannot happily witness her obstinate vulnerability. “If she had any sense she would quit,” he says, echoing her own advice to him: “You shouldn't be so unbending, David. It isn't heroic to be unbending” (D 66). She finally accepts an offer from her neighbor and former helper Petrus to become his third wife in return for his protection: “I agree, it is humiliating,” she tells her father.

There is little comedy in Disgrace, though David Lurie has a strong defensive sense of his own ridiculousness, and the chamber opera he is writing, Byron in Italy, surprises him by becoming a comedy: “It is not the erotic that is calling to him after all, nor the elegiac, but the comic,” surely mirroring to some extent the ludicrousness of his own postdisgrace life (D 184). Coetzee's next novel, Elizabeth Costello, begins somberly, if not grimly, with the aging, tired novelist making unsuitable speeches in various settings. Her passions are all out of step with her audiences: animal rights, vegetarianism, the problem of evil in literature—her views are not received with enthusiasm despite her reputation (based, gallingly, mainly on a novel she wrote in the 1960s). But, like a true Coetzee