What’s so disturbing about Coetzee’s Disgrace?

A couple of weeks ago, over a lobbyist-like lunch in a Commission-crowded coffee shop, my companion remarked: “Every time I tell friends to read Disgrace, and they go away and read it, they suddenly stop returning my calls. It’s one of my favourite books. You’re a literary person. Give it a go.”

So I did and I soon began to wonder whether I would take said friend’s calls again. Disgrace is indeed a disturbing read - and relentlessly so - but the way in which Coetzee crafts a taut and compelling narrative makes for an affecting novel that’s ultimately a work of art.

In just over 200 pages, Disgrace grapples with the big political issues of race, sex and power in post-apartheid South Africa but not gratuitously so and not without diffusing the blame. The protagonist, David Lurie is a repulsive man with few redeeming qualities, a respectable misogynist who sees women in exclusively sexual terms, including his own daughter. When the university professor has a relationship with a student, “an affair” which, to my mind, was begun by rape, he is forced out of his job in disgrace and goes to stay with his daughter on her smallholding in the veld. The father and daughter are attacked on the farm and it has devastating consequences that change both their lives forever.

Coetzee has mastered the art of saying so much while saying very little. This is how he manages to cram a great deal into a relatively thin volume. While economical with his prose, he doesn’t hold back on the moral questions, which are controversial and wide-ranging and where the uneasiness with Lurie’s character begins for the reader.  

Coetzee’s prose is stiflingly tight and subtle with no room for air. Not a spare word makes it on to the page which forces the reader to read between the lines and draw his or her own conclusions about the characters’ motivations. 

Which is what makes Disgrace such a challenging read. By giving the reader just enough (rope), Coetzee challenges him to make assumptions in the literary world that s/he would not feel comfortable making in the real world. Consequently, the reader feels complicit in the depravity of Coetzee’s fictional realm, so engaged is s/he with the true-to-life characters and situations that they take an emotional toll. He makes us question our norms, allegiances and values. He makes us question ourselves.

Well-structured and deftly executed, Disgrace is a classic, but it’s not without its flaws. Lurie’s failed obsession with Byron and Teresa is sometimes an unnecessary and intrusive distraction as is the tendency to rely on the reader to know a little too much to propel the book along. That said, Disgrace is so deep with dark layers that on a second reading new interpretations are bound to come to light.

Disgrace is a book that manages to polarise opinion but that is, undoubtedly, one of its strengths. A couple of weeks later, while extolling the virtues of the book to another friend, I mentioned how it made me see South Africa with new eyes.

“Don’t let the views of a white South African living in Australia put you off going to South Africa,” she said. “Go and see for yourself.”

End of discussion. I wonder if she’ll take my calls?