Journal of Southern African Studies

Coetzee and Post-Apartheid South Africa Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee Review by: David Attwell Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Dec., 2001), pp. 865-867 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/823418 . Accessed: 17/11/2013 22:54
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Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies, Volume27, Number 4, December 2001

Book Reviews
Coetzee and post-apartheid South Africa J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London, Vintage, 1999), 219 pp., ?14.99 hbk, ISBN 0436204894.
Readers who follow Coetzee closely will have become wary of too easy a linkage between historical events and their fictionalreprisalin his novels. If it is the case that history, or historicalconsciousness, is seldom given a priori status, it would be safe to assume that it would be better to look elsewhere for the fiction's deeper forms of investment, and indeed, the more significant categories in Coetzee have frequentlybeen the aesthetic and the ethical, or the aesthetic and ethical in combination.Given this record, one should be cautious in discussing what is Coetzee's first serious encounter with post-apartheidSouth Africa in quite these terms. Except that, in Disgrace, he accepts the invitation to take on post-apartheidSouth Africa in all its ambiguity.This goes furtherthan the selection of the milieu, for it is built into the novel's temporal structureas well. In fact, 'post-ness' is woven seamlessly into the consciousness and fate of the centralcharacter,David Lurie, and its pertinenceis made explicit in a particularverbal configuration that Lurie teaches his students. That configurationis the 'perfective', a syntactic markerof aspect within the perfect tense. Lurie brings this awareness out in a moment such as the following: Two weeks ago he was in a classroom explaining to the bored youth of the country the distinctionbetween drink and drink up, burned and burnt. The perfective, signifying an action carriedthroughto its conclusion. How far away it all seems! I live, I have lived, I lived. (p. 71) A more complete description of the perfective would note that the action that has been carried throughto its conclusion lies in the recent, ratherthan the distant, past and that its consequences are still very much in evidence. Post-ness, indeed. Usurp, burn, live and drive are verbs that are rendered in the perfective at various moments, with ever-wideningimplications.These usages refer, inter alia, to the attack on Lurie and his daughter,Lucy, at her farm (burned-burnt);to the desire that runs through him (as he explains afterwards) for Melanie, the young student (burned-burnt);to the cremationof the unwanteddogs that Lurie helps to euthanise at the animal welfare clinic (burnedburnt); and to the desire that leads to Lucy's being gang-rapedin the attack (drive-driven). Incidentally,there are a numberof ways in which desire and burningare linked in this novel, too many to enumeratefully here; suffice to point to the largerimplicationsof this connection in Lurie's reflection, 'Omnis gens quaecumquese in se perficere vult. [Loosely: 'Every nation, whatever it is, wishes to perfect itself in itself.'] The seed of generation,driven to perfect itself, driving deep into the woman's body, driving to bring the future into being. Drive, driven' (p. 194). The pathologies underlyingthe cruelties of history, this passage seems to suggest, have a social-biological foundation in the 'seed of generation', what Lurie elsewhere calls 'snake-venom', enforcing nature's grand design. The novel's most intense passages explore the consequences of this life-giving, and death-giving, energy. The syndromeLurie lives out, then, as the embodimentof the perfective, is both the result of the attackin which he is burnt,and of his own unrestrained desire - ironically, a condition he shareswith his daughter'srapists. Lurie is both victim and agent of destruction.But the syndrome of living on, 'after the storm' (a phrase used with referenceto George Grosz, well known for satiricalillustrations of Weimardecadence) also relates to the general historical situationof the novel, which the first third of the text is careful to establish. Lurie is - not to put too fine a point on it - living beyond his time. As he recognises, 'his mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go' (p. 72); his is 'a case that can no longer be heard, basta' (p. 89). Lurie's curiosity about, and abandonmentto, sensual impulse, and his aestheticisation of desire, no longer have any cultural weight in the world he lives in. His ego has been nurturedin Romanticismand modernistirony, but even his university has abandonedhis icons, placating him with a course on the Romantics for the
ISSN 0305-7070 print; 1465-3893 online/01/040865-13 (? 2001 Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies DOI: 10.1080/03057070120090721

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866 Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies sake of morale, but in reality wanting his labour only to teach functionalistcommunicationstheory. In a certainparadoxicalsense, it is Lurie who has no culture, since there is nothing to embracehim. of academic life (behind that post-Cold War globalisation)refractedthroughthe The corporatisation end of apartheid,leave him historically marooned,but his manicuredmasculinityenables him to get away with it, for a short while, before history catches up with him. It does this on two occasions: in his disciplinary hearing for sexual harassmentat the Cape TechnicalUniversity,and later, in the attackon his daughter'sfarm, where he goes to recuperateafter becoming a spectacle. The hearing is significant in several ways, not least because it is, in fact, the only occasion when what we might call the public sphere is in evidence in the novel. Coetzee's South Africa leaves the public sphere out almost entirely:there is no state, account of post-apartheid constitution,or law, to speak of, only a relentless working-outof the passions governing ruralSouth South Africa is undergoinga kind of recession Africa, as the sump of history. In fact, post-apartheid of modernity,in which the tides held back by decades of social engineering are beginning to wash back. On the N2 outside Cape Town, the 'streamof cars has to slow down while a child with a stick herds a stray cow off the road. Inexorably,he thinks, the country is coming to the city. Soon there will be cattle on Rondebosch Common; soon history will have come full circle' (p. 175). In this being cooked up in Parliamentmay well context, post-enlightenmentdreams of rainbow-nationhood be irrelevant.Except that the public sphere, broadly,does make a brief appearancein the hearing, in which the obvious point of reference is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Lurie's refusal to offer the desired tone of penitence, while admittingguilt, becomes the focus of attention in this passage, so one is drawn to the conclusion that an institutionallydriven quest for confession and reconciliation is really simply another Foucauldiandevice of regulation, and in Lurie's terms, another attack on the notion of a private life. (That the actual TRC avoided making atonement a condition of amnesty places Coetzee in agreementwith it, however, not in opposition, as one might assume from this.) The other occasion when history catches up with Lurie is in the attack on Lucy's farm. Here an impulse towardallegory is most in evidence in the novel, since the farm is carefully positioned in the heartof the EasternCape, indeed Kaffraria,at Salem ('Peace') duringthe early years of land reform, which makes Disgrace a reprisalof the farm novel tradition,which Coetzee himself has explored in White Writing,In the Heart of the Country,and Life and Times of Michael K. The two figures who carry most allegorical weight are the rural landownerswho must negotiate a future together:Petrus (Peter, the Rock, bearer of an historical destiny), the former farm-handwho knows his time has hippie, arrived,and Lucy, heir of a settler history, attemptingto live lightly, as a post-industrial-age on the simple routines and pleasures of rurallife, but who cannot avoid becoming the representative of settlerdom'slong history of appropriation. Lucy's rape is a case, however, of paying for the sins, not only of the fathers, but also of her own father, whose seduction of Melanie had a degree of coercion about it. When David's efforts to counsel Lucy are rejected, with Lucy using silence to recover a sense of her own agency and identity, one is made acutely aware that his position is deeply compromised,as a near-rapisthimself, despite the aestheticisationof his passions. The settlementreached by Lucy and Petrus by the end of the novel is disturbingindeed: having connived in the attack on the farm and in Lucy's rape, Petrus uses Lucy's vulnerabilityto make a move on her property;Lucy, in turn, lesbian but carryinga rapist's child, refuses an abortion,and in order not to be defeated by being driven off the land, contemplatesbecoming the latest addition to Petrus's polygamous household. Lurie cannot absorb this, partly because it is not an especially plausible outcome; it is best thought of as allegorical, representingthe extreme case in the working out of what it might mean for a white person to take on an African identity - certainly it is difficult not to see this as a repudiationof facile assertions by whites of their Africanness. Furthermore, makes the nation (if Coetzee's reprisalof the postcolonial trope of the expectantmother-of-the-nation such this is) the producerof a bitter, and ambiguous legacy. To returnto David Lurie, his state of 'disgrace' is tied up with living beyond one's time, living in an age that has withdrawnany possibility of understanding, compassion, forgiveness. The novel's central core of selfhood has become othered by history itself, rendered useless and even comic, despite the pain of being criminallytorturedby being burnt.Interestingly,the particulartemporality of Disgrace lies in its being located after the 'end-of-history',which was Coetzee's metier in earlier phases of his writing.

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Book Reviews 867 What is the redundantself to do, then? Lurie develops two projects in which an ambiguous accommodationto his fate begins to emerge: he helps to put down abandoneddogs (mainly from the and he writes a chamberopera based on one township) at the animal welfare clinic in Grahamstown, of Byron's last affairs. The story of the writing of the opera is one of a progressive thinning-out,or etiolation. While it begins with sonorous invocations- in the mannerof Gluck's Orfeo - of the grand passion between Byron and Theresa Guiccioli, it graduallyabandonsByron himself and switches to a later period, long after Byron's death, to foregrounda middle-agedTheresa singing of her lost love and youthfulness.Theresathus answers to David's sense of living in the aftermathof a life of desire. Of course, it is significant that Lurie is able to place himself in the feminine position at this point, a counter-movement to his earlierinvestmentin careless masculinity.Any thought,however, that the opera is likely to dignify a life of permanentpost-coital recession is lost, when the prevailing genre of the opera shifts from elegy to comedy, with Theresa's lines being accompaniedby the plucking of a home-madetownshipbanjo. Art may transform, but it does not follow that it will always console. As the novel ends, Lurie is holed up in Grahamstown, awaitingthe birthof his grandchild,keeping himself occupied by giving the dogs a dignified end. It is, of course, himself that he ministers to, holding the animals lovingly as the needle finds its mark and then bundling them up for the incinerator.The fires of his sexuality - he speaks of it in those terms to Melanie's father - and of his being burntby attackers,are metonymicallylinked to these moments of conflagrationin which he helps to transport dogs to the other world. This is the clearest of those moments when Coetzee opens up the realm of a secular sublime, where the cancelling imperativesof simple ontology, of being a creature of energy, outweigh the failures of history. There is no redeeming consciousness in the humanitydepicted in the novel; therefore,if grace is available at all, it will lie in simple acts of love that will enable the world's creaturesto die graciously. Ontologicalconsciousness thus takes the place of historicalconsciousness - not existentialism,exactly, since there is nothingprogrammatic aboutthe novel's resolution,only a shift to a more elemental layer of meaning.It is a shift we have seen before, in Michael K, for instance, whose durabilityis both less, and more than, human.
DAVID ATTWELL

Universityof Natal, Pietermaritzburg

Environment and water: critical viewpoints

Environment M. Chenje, Reviewing the Southern African Environment: A Media Handbook (Harare: Southern African Resource and Documentation Centre; Southern African Development Community Environment and Land Management Sector; ICUN World Conservation Union, 1998), xi + 271 pp., ?10.95/$18.95 pbk, ISBN 1-77910002-7. This book gives the scoop on southernAfrican environmentalreporting,at least on the environmental reportingthat its publishers,the SouthernAfrican Development Community(SADC) and the World ConservationUnion (IUCN), would like to see. The subtext of the book is that the environmentis newsworthy primarilyas a resource for economic development. Therefore, it exhorts journalists to give favourablecoverage to environmentalpolicies that promote economic development. The guide contains much useful information for a journalist. Tables give population histories (althoughthey cite early data uncritically).Helpful appendicessummariseenvironmentalconventions ratifiedby SADC countries and give the Rio Principles. The book also recommendsfurtherreading and lists contact people in the SADC. A glossary gives user-friendlytranslationsto technical terms, although I hope the example about 'meaningless technical language' is written in jest. Rather than 'The wolf spider Lycosa pseudoannulate is an effective predator of certain rice pests', the handbookprefers: 'Wolf spiders are our friends. They hunt and kill the insects that harm your rice' (p. viii). The guide gives short, accessible chapterson importantenvironmentaltopics: population,water, marine environments,biological diversity, forests, protected areas, air pollution, and environmental

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