DISGRACE BY J. M. COETZEE

Readers Notes for Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee

Who wrote this piece?

J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town 1940. When he was eight his father lost his government job and they went to live in the provincial town of Worcester. ‘South Africa was a bad start’… ‘An undistinguished, rural family, bad schooling, the Afrikaans language: from each of these component handicaps he has, more or less, escaped’ is how Coetzee described his own early years in his memoir Youth.

Coetzee started writing prose while doing a day job as a computer programmer in the UK. He had come to London hoping to be inspired as a poet, and was disappointed by the tameness of the poetry scene in the mid-1960s. He went on to study in the USA, and has held several academic posts and visiting lectureships there. He returned to South Africa to teach at the University of Cape Town (1972 – 83) and his first novel Dusklands was published in 1974. From 2002 Coetzee has lived in Australia. J. M. Coetzee’s reputation for being a recluse – he never gives interviews – hasn’t hampered his literary success. He is the only author so far to win the Booker Prize twice, with Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999). J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. 

Read a biography, bibliography and critical review of J. M. Coetzee here

What is the piece and what is it about?

Disgrace is a short novel, first published in 1999. It marked a return to writing about South Africa for J. M.Coetzee, who had temporarily lost his subject with the end of apartheid. Disgrace is about the downfall of a Cape Town academic, David Lurie, who pursues and seduces Melanie, one of his students. He won’t publicly repent or accept counselling when judged by a university disciplinary tribunal, so he loses his job and retreats to his daughter Lucy’s farm. But he doesn’t find the quiet life he might have hoped for there. In a violent attack David is beaten up and set alight and Lucy is viciously raped with the possible collaboration of her nearest neighbour, Petrus.

The novel examines the power shift in the new South Africa between blacks and whites, and about how precarious this new relationship is made by South Africa’s troubled history. It’s also about the abuse of power in relationships between men and women, between humans and animals; about ageing, about the impulse for artistic expression and what it means to be human.  

What kind of read is it?

We are introduced in the first line of Disgrace to David Lurie as a divorced man whose life is well-organised and stable: ‘For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well'. He is a disenchanted Cape Town academic who appears to think rather than to feel, even though he teaches Romantic poetry. Near the beginning of the novel his tidy life is blown apart by experiencing intense lust for Melanie, an almost wholly unresponsive student of his. As a reader, it’s like watching a road-crash in slow motion. You know he should leave her alone, he knows he should leave her alone, ‘(unbidden the word letching comes to him)’, but he won’t. He is feeling his age and is worried that he might not experience intense desire again.

When the affair is publicly exposed and he has to go before a university tribunal, it’s clear that he doesn’t really want to be forgiven and won’t do what is necessary to keep his job. So he is publicly disgraced.

The heart of the novel is David Lurie’s flight to his daughter Lucy’s farm in the Eastern Cape, for a visit or ‘asylum’ as she suggests. His daughter is so unlike him that, while he is impressed by her practical skills and independence, he doesn’t cease to be surprised that he should have a daughter like Lucy. ‘Curious that he and her mother, cityfolk, intellectuals, should have produced this throwback, this sturdy young settler. But perhaps it was not they who produced her, perhaps history had the larger share.’

During a violent burglary on the farm Lucy is subjected to multiple rape by two black men and a young boy. David is locked up and unable to help his daughter. David and Lucy are driven further apart by their responses to the assault. An important strand of the story is David’s learning to be more humane while resisting admitting to himself or anyone else that this is what he is doing. ‘All right, I’ll do it. But only as long as I don’t have to become a better person. I am not prepared to be reformed.’ While feeling physically repelled by the smelliness of dogs and by Bev Shaw, a neighbour of Lucy’s, he agrees to help in the clinic where Bev puts down dogs who have been abandoned. At first suspicious of Bev’s motives, David learns to care for the animals and give them dignity in death.

Even though the novel is narrated in the third person, we are very much focused on the thoughts and feelings of David Lurie. And though David can be self-deluding, obstinate, remote and superior, it feels almost painfully intimate to share the thoughts and feelings of such a private man who clearly hasn’t been able to convey all that he feels, like his love for his daughter. The language is almost startlingly simple, clear and pared-down, yet on almost every page there is a sentence that is so elegantly expressed and full of insight that one would like to note it down and remember it. 

When we’ve read it, how could we structure our discussion?

• The novel is written in the third person but we see things from David Lurie’s viewpoint. Do you think he is the hero of the story?
• Does David become a better human being as a result of his experiences?
• J. M. Coetzee wrote in his memoir: ‘Prose, fortunately, does not demand emotion: there is that to be said for it.’ Do you believe him? Do you think that as an author he is cool and unwilling to express emotion?
• David Lurie is disgraced in the story because he has preyed on a vulnerable student. Do you think the story is about other forms of disgrace?
• How would you describe David’s relationship with his daughter Lucy? Does it get stronger or more fraught in the course of the novel?
• We are more aware of David’s feelings about Lucy than we are of hers about him. How do you think Lucy would describe David?
• If this novel is telling us about the current reality of South Africa, what is it saying? Is it a very bleak vision?

Reading group tip: You may find that your opinions about the characters divide quite strongly along lines of gender, race or personal experience of parenthood. If this is the case, you will need to ensure that each member of the group is given space to express their opinions clearly in the discussion. Come back to the piece of writing to help the group maintain objectivity if things get too personal.  

If we enjoyed this, what other writing might appeal to us?

J. M. Coetzee has written other novels set in South Africa, though it sometimes appears as an unnamed country, as in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), or a South Africa of the future as in Life and Times of Michael K (1983). Books by J. M. Coetzee on the enCompass website.

Nadine Gordimer and Andre Brink have written novels about the political changes in South Africa.

For fiction, stories and poetry connected with Africa see ‘Reading Africa’.

Try our African Writing Quiz.