Nobody else's book club: J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace
Disgrace is a very hard read. Its main character, a white middle-aged South African man, is a despicable man, but what will happen to him during the course of this short novel is a lot more than he or anyone else deserves. Without giving much of the plot away, I will only say that a lot will happen to him and his once comfortable life will change dramatically and irrevocably for the much worse in a short period of time. In this sense, this a coming of age story. Not the traditional coming of age that corresponds to the transition from childhood to adulthood, but that of a middle-aged man who has lived a protected and privileged life so far, but, as he starts to enter old age, discovers the world is a cruel place to most people (and animals).
In my view, Disgrace's main subject is white man's privilege and the loss of some of it in the contemporary world and specifically in post-apartheid South Africa. Sexual harassment, racial conflict, sexual identity, animal rights and land ownership take centre stage and Coetzee achieves the extraordinary feat of packing all of these difficult subjects and treating them with reasonable depth in little more than 200 pages. At a time when the news are dominated by Trump's antics, Black Lives Matter and the Weinstein scandal, this book could not be more relevant. But even if we ignore the news imposed to us from the other side of the pond, the subjects of sexual, gender and racial identities are at the heart of the human experience at a time when mass migration and the pill have dramatically changed the world we live in. It is fair to say this visionary novel, published in 1999, is already a classic of English literature of the late 20th century and even more relevant in the 21st one.
Disgrace offers no easy answers to difficult problems. I would argue instead that what Coetzee does in his novel is to prove that there are no answers to the problems it deals with. This is another reason why this novel is so hard to read, it offers us the bleak truth that in fact the administration of justice to correct past injustices is impossible. Consider in particular the story of Lucy, one can argue that what happens to her is what happened to black men and women when white men arrived in South Africa. Still two wrongs will never make a right and what happens to her is revolting to any decent human being. But how to go about redistributing wealth without taking from those who have in order to give to those who do not, when not doing it means perpetuating the injustice grown by history? In this sense, Lucy's passivity can be explained by her acceptance that justice is impossible, that cruelty is the natural, unavoidable way of the world, and that the law of survival of the strongest means the weak will survive under the protection of the strong, be it the protection of the apartheid state or the protection of a man.
But it is not only with historical justice that Disgrace deals with. At the heart of the matter of justice and its impossibility is the limitation of resources. This is true not only in the obvious case of land ownership and health distribution, but in every relationship between human beings and even between humans and animals. It is by introducing the subject of cruelty against animals that Coetzee makes this point the most clear. Here again the law of survival of the strongest and the fact that the weak only survive under the protection of the strong is in evidence.
All of that and Coetzee still finds the space to discuss how art can be used to justify callousness, but also to grow empathy. An absolute must-read.
In my view, Disgrace's main subject is white man's privilege and the loss of some of it in the contemporary world and specifically in post-apartheid South Africa. Sexual harassment, racial conflict, sexual identity, animal rights and land ownership take centre stage and Coetzee achieves the extraordinary feat of packing all of these difficult subjects and treating them with reasonable depth in little more than 200 pages. At a time when the news are dominated by Trump's antics, Black Lives Matter and the Weinstein scandal, this book could not be more relevant. But even if we ignore the news imposed to us from the other side of the pond, the subjects of sexual, gender and racial identities are at the heart of the human experience at a time when mass migration and the pill have dramatically changed the world we live in. It is fair to say this visionary novel, published in 1999, is already a classic of English literature of the late 20th century and even more relevant in the 21st one.
Disgrace offers no easy answers to difficult problems. I would argue instead that what Coetzee does in his novel is to prove that there are no answers to the problems it deals with. This is another reason why this novel is so hard to read, it offers us the bleak truth that in fact the administration of justice to correct past injustices is impossible. Consider in particular the story of Lucy, one can argue that what happens to her is what happened to black men and women when white men arrived in South Africa. Still two wrongs will never make a right and what happens to her is revolting to any decent human being. But how to go about redistributing wealth without taking from those who have in order to give to those who do not, when not doing it means perpetuating the injustice grown by history? In this sense, Lucy's passivity can be explained by her acceptance that justice is impossible, that cruelty is the natural, unavoidable way of the world, and that the law of survival of the strongest means the weak will survive under the protection of the strong, be it the protection of the apartheid state or the protection of a man.
But it is not only with historical justice that Disgrace deals with. At the heart of the matter of justice and its impossibility is the limitation of resources. This is true not only in the obvious case of land ownership and health distribution, but in every relationship between human beings and even between humans and animals. It is by introducing the subject of cruelty against animals that Coetzee makes this point the most clear. Here again the law of survival of the strongest and the fact that the weak only survive under the protection of the strong is in evidence.
All of that and Coetzee still finds the space to discuss how art can be used to justify callousness, but also to grow empathy. An absolute must-read.
Next book: Candide by Voltaire.
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