Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (61 page)

Disgrace
opens in high confidence: “For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.” David Lurie knows his needs, knows how to satisfy them, has his arrangements under control: he has sex on Thursday afternoons with the tall, slim prostitute Soraya; it takes care of his wants. On page two Coetzee limns his protagonist still more clearly and broadly: “He is in good health; his mind is clear. By profession he is, or has been, a scholar, and scholarship still engages, intermittently, the core of him. He lives within his income, within his temperament, within his emotional means. Is he happy? By most measurements, yes, he believes he is. However, he has not forgotten the last chorus of
Oedipus:
Call no man happy until he is dead.” Without that last ominous Sophoclean tag, what reader would be suspicious here? Yet we will see just how time-bound and precarious David’s attainments are, for he is destined to be damaged, if not undone, on all these fronts: health, mind, profession, income, temperament, and emotion. He is slated for a fall. By book’s end, we are to understand all of David’s achievements, balance, and equipment as the residue of privilege and luck, as overdue loans that are about to be called.

In keeping with the initial note that is struck, Coetzee locates the impending downfall in the sex department. David starts a liaison with his student Melanie, some thirty years his junior. This is motivated in part by hints that his sexual ease and authority are not quite what they used to be: Soraya has broken with him; women seem no longer to respond to his glance. But the tryst with Melanie stirs him deeply, inflames him with a kind of desire and urgency that had seemed to be gone from his life. He presses his attentions on her, beds her, is enthralled by her youthful body and by the fierceness of his wants. Melanie herself is hard to read: she accepts his overtures yet holds back, hints that she may have a lover her own age, but she does not resist him. At least not the first time. Trouble comes the next go-around: he surprises her in her flat and essentially storms her, carrying her to the bed, unstoppable, touched (as the language has it) by “the quiver of Aphrodite.” But his ardor is not shared. Postcoital, he reflects: “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck.” We note not only the familiar story of power abuse but also the reference to the animal world. Registers are in play here. The voyage has begun.

David’s transgression is distressingly familiar. One of his (female) colleagues does not hesitate to place him in a long tradition of abusive acts and actors, reminding us that males have been doing such things for some time now. Melanie, as I’ve observed, seems at least partly consenting—I’ve found, in teaching this book, that undergraduates resist this line of reasoning staunchly, placing all the blame on the older man, thereby giving me much to think about—and thus, when the affair becomes public and explodes into disciplinary hearings, David is certain that she has been forced into this accusation against him. Yet the book goes on to suggest that she is indeed traumatized by his behavior, given that she drops out of school and seems genuinely damaged. Now, none of this prevents David from vigorously (and quixotically) defending his behavior: not only will he not recant, as he is asked to do by the committee members, but he says that he was a “servant of Eros,” that he regrets having denied such impulses in the past, adds that he was “enriched” by the experience, even to the point of (later) citing Blake’s proverb “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” None of this goes over well. And even if Melanie is no infant in a cradle, he has inflicted damage nonetheless. Rules have been broken. The final outcome is no surprise: he is sacked.

As in
Lear
, the story of abuse is generational and political. But Coetzee wants us to understand that Lurie’s taking advantage of his position as professor may not constitute his deepest misstep, his true transgression. His ex-wife, Rosalind, gives him the news: “You’re what—fifty-two? Do you think a young girl finds any pleasure in going to bed with a man of that age? Do you think she finds it good to watch you in the middle of your …?” On this note, the novel moves into new territory. We have seen in Molière that the spectacle of old men trying to bed young girls is a staple item of comedy, even if it can also be the source of great pathos, if we elect to read
Othello
along those lines. Coetzee, however, is drawn less to the tragicomic dimensions of this theme than to the light it sheds on a host of issues, ranging from the male climacteric to the rights of desire, seen against a backdrop not merely of institutional power arrangements but of geopolitical and racial relationships as well, extending finally to privileges that go beyond the precincts of white males and gesture toward a still-larger hubris: that of the human subject lording it over the animals who share the stage with him. But even my emphasis on power is too narrow, since the book is no less cued to how we respond to death: what are our responsibilities as well as our rights?

One’s response to
Disgrace
has much to do with one’s age. My undergraduates are greatly exercised by the teacher coming on to his student, but they show little interest in the meditation on aging. (Time will teach them to read otherwise, I suspect, should they happen to pick this book up again in their later years.) For David Lurie is beginning to note the temporal treadmill he is on. Leaving Cape Town and taking up with his (lesbian) daughter Lucy, David is aware of her eyes on him as he eats: “He must be careful: nothing so distasteful to a child as the workings of a parent’s body.” It is a stinging perception, one that Antigone must also have had in ministering to her feeble, broken-down, blind father, even if Sophocles did not think it worth writing down. David is beginning, just beginning, to see himself in the round. The warnings are coming, even if his own name is not yet attached to them.

The urbane former literature professor drives far into the country to visit Lucy, who lives on a smallholding, and we sense their estrangement from each other, a distance that goodwill and tenderness cannot easily overcome. David is game to try out a new life: he meets Petrus, a black man who now owns a portion of her land, the “dog man,” who assists Lucy with the farming and the dogs she kennels; he meets Bev Shaw, a no-neck, cylindrical little woman who volunteers at the animal shelter, whose charitable labors and homely body fail to impress him. Lucy senses his general disapproval of her life, based on her failure to achieve something “higher,” but she stoutly defends her choices: “They [my friends] are not going to lead me to a higher life, and the reason is, there is no higher life. This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals.” David demurs, but the reader is left wondering: how does this sharing take place?

Arguably the most perfect image of David’s impending crisis is located in an animal clinic, where David, searching for some way to make himself useful, has volunteered to help Bev Shaw carry out her duties vis-à-vis the sick and dying animals brought her way. In this instance it is a full-grown male goat that can barely walk: “One half of his scrotum, yellow and purple, is swollen like a balloon; the other half is a mass of caked blood and dirt.” He is routinely savaged by dogs, we are told. Bev cleans his wound and discovers “white grubs waving their blind heads in the air.” Certain that his siring days are over, she offers to put him down, but his owner resists. At this juncture she kneels down beside the animal, nuzzles his throat, and whispers, “What do you say, my friend? … What do you say? Is it enough?” This is the question that is being put to David Lurie as well, even though he does not yet know it. And whereas Coetzee cannot decorously zoom in on a fifty-two-year-old man’s scrotum and testicles, he can show us a marked, wounded goat at the end, as it were, of his tether, no longer “any good.” Siring is over for good. To the owner Bev says, “I can give him a quiet end. He will let me do that for him. Shall I?” We must all end. Shall it be quiet or not? Do we ever know when it is enough? How will we exit?

Literature makes its moves by indirection, so that we read the story of a male sexual end game in cross-species fashion. More, much more, is to come. David Lurie is scheduled for a crash course in altered self-perception, in gauging one’s time-bound privileges, that will make the Melanie saga look tame and innocuous. Now comes the bombshell. Lucy and David are attacked by three black men—one is only a boy—and nothing will ever be the same again. Lucy is raped—impregnated, we will later learn—and David is set on fire: spirits are poured on his head and lit as he remains locked in the bathroom, unable to go to his daughter’s aid. David had earlier reflected on the notion of a completed action, as conveyed by verb tense, and recalls trying to teach his students “the distinction between
drink
and
drink up, burned
and
burnt
. The perfective, signifying an action carried through to its conclusion.”
Burn, burned, burnt
becomes a well-nigh incandescent figure for the life and times of David Lurie. He has burned with sexual desire and satisfied his need with his young student. There is more burning to come. The quasi rape that cost him his job is now followed by a much less ambiguous, much more sordid and violent rape that is going to cost him much more still.

Coetzee is out to measure the temporal curve that graphs all individual lives—the goat’s, the professor’s—and also the life of a country. Things are not over where you think they end. Melanie’s fate bleeds into Lucy’s. David’s confident days as cocksman, as one who “has solved the problem of sex rather well,” as a father who wants only to protect his daughter against harm, as a white man inhabiting South Africa, as a human being sharing the stage with other species: all this is seen to be inscribed in a still-moving continuum that he had never pondered, a continuum that is now entering into its final phase. Actions are being carried through to their conclusion.

We all know the expression “in the fullness of time.” It has a fetching aura of mystery. Only then will all be revealed, only then will what has been sown be harvested. Whether it be the birth of a child or the moment of death, this event closes our waiting time and shows us what has been wrought. Coetzee wants us to realize that growing old obliges us to take sterner and harder measures, to recognize where we are on this curve, which moves us not only deathward but also toward a conclusion: a grasp of life’s logic at last played out in its entirety, a grasp of forces evolving toward their inevitable end. Reflection is needed, but not only reflection. David Lurie must be
burned, burnt
, to comprehend the larger shape of his life. Not unlike Lear, Lurie too must be “bound / Upon a wheel of fire.”

He suffers a crucible experience, a literal holocaust, which takes him forever out of the life of ease, appetite, and power he was accustomed to; partially disfigured, his hair burned off, his wounds slowly mending, he knows himself now to be “one of those sorry creatures whom children gawk at in the street.” After Lucy’s rape, he sees himself differently: “he has a taste of what it will be like to be an old man, tired to the bone, without hopes, without desires, indifferent to the future.” In an arresting phrase that recalls Lucy’s fate, Coetzee describes David as bleeding. Then we read: “His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float toward his end.… The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.”

Again, this is cunning writing. Odorless gas, steel touching your throat: such references signal Holocaust in its other historical form—the Jews sent to the cyanide showers, the victims rounded up for the slaughter. At one point in the novel, David sees the young boy who participated in the rape, sees him at Petrus’s party, and stands his ground, insists on being fully seen himself, wounds and all; Coetzee writes it like this: “He lifts a hand to his white skullcap. For the first time he is glad to have it, to wear it as his own.” Large things are coming into focus, as the professor is figured Jewish, touching his yarmulke, signaling his membership in a community of victims. Lucy comes to understand her rape in comparable terms: “What if … what if
that
is the price one has to pay for staying on?” The story of South Africa is a harsh one of exploitation and penance, of injuries and redress, of finding oneself caught up in a history that began long ago and will end long after one’s death. Privileges that seemed permanent are no more than loans that can be called, will be called.

Lucy is willing to pay the price. She will bear the child she carries, and she will enter into Petrus’s African family as a kind of third wife, giving him her land, all so that the child will be protected, so that she too can stay, sheltered if not happy. It is the cost of staying, and it is total. David tells her she is mad, that this choice is humiliating. Her answer reminds us of what Lear learned on the heath: “Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.” David’s reaction is harsh: “Like a dog.” She agrees: “Yes, like a dog.”

“Wie ein Hund.”
“Like a dog.” These are K’s closing words in Kafka’s
The Trial
, as the henchman of the Law plunges his great knife into him. Kafka’s story is about the impossibility of finding justice; remember the man from the country who spends his life “before the Law,” awaiting entry. Kafka further notes that K’s murder is the source of a great shame that would outlive him. But Coetzee has inverted Kafka’s tale. Lucy moves knowingly into the sacrificial slot and lowers her head for the blade. She elects to be erased, to be brought down to nothing, to be stripped of all power. A sacrificial logic is being enacted. She feels it is what history and place require. It is the logical if hideous consequence of the life she earlier led. An action has been carried through to its conclusion.