I finished the conclusion of my dissertation on Friday afternoon, which was a few days after I originally thought I would complete it. I sent it off to my supervisor and, though she made a few small suggestions for revision, it looks like I am essentially done with that section of the dissertation now, too. This means that, save for the sort of minor editing one does with any book-length manuscript, all I have left to do is write my introduction.
This, however, is a bit more daunting a task than it may sound. Because it has to be fairly lengthy and because it requires that I summarize my ideas, but especially because I know it will be the first thing any potential reader encounters, I am feeling a bit more anxiety about its writing than I had anticipated. I mean, when I wrote my M.A. thesis back in 2003, the introduction was probably the easiest part of the entire project and, really, it did not take me an especially long time to put together. This introduction, on the other hand, feels different, weightier, more demanding. And, indeed, it is. When speaking with my advisor over the weekend, I was more than a little surprised to learn how long the average introduction tends to be. My initial response was, perhaps not surprisingly, mild dismay. "Damn," I thought, "I guess I won't be finishing it by the last day of the semester!" And all my dreams of celebratory December vacations to warmer climes dissipated.
Of course, it's idiotic to feel anything but satisfaction at this point. I mean, I am remarkably close to the end of my dissertation, something that I could only imagine -- and imagine poorly -- two years ago. Still, it probably means that I will have to do a bit of re-reading over the next couple of weeks in preparation for that final bit of writing. I'll have to read over my dissertation, of course, but also Foe and In the Heart of the Country. I will have to reread some criticism, too. It feels like I have just finished the eleventh hour of a twelve-hour drive and, stifling yawns and straining to keep my eyes open, I see a construction zone ahead.
So, I guess I will have to shift gears this one last time, regroup, and begin the homestretch.
On a separate, though related note, I finally got around to watching the film adaptation of Disgrace. It's not a bad movie. The acting is pretty solid all the way through, the cinematography is beautiful, the plot largely true to the book. The problem with the adaptation is that the film essentially dismisses the reflective layer of Coetzee's novel. John Malkovich's David Lurie does all, or virtually all, the things Coetzee's Lurie does, but that's only the most superficial layer of the novel. David's internal life, the thoughts and feelings and reflections that animate and illuminate the book are, by necessity, largely absent from the film. There are, to be sure, moments where David's words or a particularly well-crafted scene gives a sense of the man's thoughts, but that crucial layer of the text is lost in translation.
Having lost several hours of prime internet access to the vicissitudes of summertime electrical storms, I find myself writing tonight's entry quite a bit later than I would otherwise have done. I mean, I am routinely awake after two in the morning, but I am a bit sleepier than I would prefer to be when trying to write something of even marginal readability. Oh, well. At least I have the Descendents to keep me energized this evening...
At any rate, I used my Saturday to read a bit more criticism on Elizabeth Costello. Well, actually, I thought I would be reading about Elizabeth Costello but the article I plucked from the stack -- Kate McInturff's "Rex Oedipus: The Ethics of Sympathy in Recent Work by J. M. Coetzee" -- ended up having more to do with Disgrace than Coetzee's subsequent novel. This, of course, is likely the result of the essay having been indexed by the MLA after I last scoured the database for Disgrace-centered criticism.
So. Getting to the article: McInturff draws on Elizabeth Costello's oft-discussed fascination with the human capacity for a sympathetic imagination that dissolves the species barrier in an effort to establish the ways in which Coetzee explores intergender, interracial, and interspecies power dynamics. The theoretical framework with which McInturff shapes her discussion of Coetzee borrows heavily from previous research by Anne McClintock and Judith Butler and stages a well-reasoned critique of the patriarchal ideologies influencing post-Enlightenment familial structure and the socio-political analogues that have shaped so much of the troubled post-apartheid culture Coetzee examines in Disgrace. Extending Costello's desire to do away with the human/non-human binaries justifying the abusive treatment of those beings (both human and non-human) that people regard as somehow inferior to themselves to the exploitative racial and gender hierarchies at the heart of Coetzee's 1999 novel, McInturff adds a passionate voice to one of the more crucial veins of Coetzee criticism.
For tomorrow: Read or write.
Work Cited
McInturff, Kate. "Rex Oedipus: The Ethics of Sympathy in Recent Work by J. M. Coetzee." Postcolonial Text 3.4 (2007).
I've had a fairly productive two days, making some progress on both the chapter I am currently in the process of writing as well as the chapter I intend to write next. So it's been a satisfying, if unpleasantly humid, couple of days at my desk.
The article that I read yesterday evening, Chris Danta's "'Like a dog . . . like a lamb': Becoming Sacrificial Animal in Kafka and Coetzee," was one of the more interesting bits of criticism that I have read lately. Focussing largely on the figure of the scapegoat, Danta mounts a strong case for viewing animals -- particularly those designated as sacrificial -- as bearers of narratives. What Coetzee scholars will find most interesting, however, is likely to be Danta's reading of Elizabeth Costello and Disgrace as texts in which animals -- and, more specifically, the bodies of animals enable -- the human being to confront and grasp his or her own mortality.
This afternoon, I returned to my chapter on Disgrace and ended up writing a few more pages, bringing myself ever-so-slightly closer to the end of this behemoth.
For tomorrow: Read or write.
Work Cited
Danta, Chris. "'Like a Dog . . . Like a Lamb': Becoming Sacrificial Animal in Kafka and Coetzee." New Literary History 38 (2007): 721-737.
When I read James Wood's review of Disgrace last August, his contemptuous tone left a bad taste in my mouth, and I said so in the post I wrote that day. Today, with some curiosity, I picked up Mr. Wood's write-up of Elizabeth Costelloand was somewhat surprised by the near-reverent language with which the critic assesses the novel.
Wood, of course, is one of the world's better English-language literary critics and, when a novel piques his interest or evokes his passion for literature, he tends to pen some of the most insightful and assessable reviews you'll ever come across. Happily, his review of Elizabeth Costello falls into this category. After dismissing the understandable aversion some readers have to the author's curious framing of the novel and positing that Coetzee is not simply "protecting himself by pre-empting criticism" or shying away from taking ownership of often unreasonable ideas, Wood insists, rather lyrically, that the then newly-minted Nobel Laureate has crafted a supreme defense of literature and emotion against the unfeeling onslaughts of some of the modern world's more disarmingly rational approaches to existence. Ultimately, Wood argues, Elizabeth Costello "inclines towards death" while celebrating the beauty of the sympathetic possibilities of the human imagination.
Recently, I also read Rebecca Ascher-Walsh's dismissal of the novel as a "near miss," Adrienne Miller's generous assessment of the book as a highly effective novel of ideas, and D. J. Taylor's seemingly reluctant embrace of Coetzee's difficult text. Wood's review, though, is by far the most insightful of the lot.
For tomorrow: Read or plan.
Works Cited:
Ascher-Walsh, Rebecca. Rev. of Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee. EW.com. 17 Oct. 2003. Available online.
Miller, Adrienne. "Great Writing About Not Writing." Rev. of Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee. Esquire 22 Oct. 2003. Available online.
Taylor, D. J. Rev. of Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee. The Independent 30 Aug. 2003. Available online.
Wood, James. "A Frog's Life." Rev. of Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee. London Review of Books 23 Oct. 2003. Available online.
For the second straight day, I've ended up staying up a bit later than I would have liked and, since I did not get a chance to read anything today (and, admittedly, because I got really into music for a few hours), I have not yet done my work for the day. So, not wanting to delay any longer, I'm gonna go do that. . .
For tomorrow: Preferably, dissertate. Alternately, read or prep.
Sobriquet 50.4: On Re-re-rereading Coetzee's Disgrace
Saturday, January 10, 2009
By Erik Grayson
One of the curious (though, surely, least surprising) effects of having spent the past half year reading and reviewing the literary criticism surrounding Disgrace is that certain things in the text stand out in ways I hadn't noticed during previous readings. Often, critical comments about the author's perceived lack of humor or his (supposedly) didactic prose will pop up while I am reading a passage and I will reflect on the relative accuracy of the accusations / interpretations. In the case of the former, for instance, I have noticed myself appreciating a certain humorous aspect of the book this time through. The humor one finds in Disgrace, of course, is not the sort of ribaldry one associates with expressly comedic writers, but neither is it the more subtle variety of black humor we often find in writers like Kafka or Beckett to whom Coetzee is often compared. No. If anything, the humor one finds in Disgrace is of the sort that might elicit a barely perceptible smirk from a cynic.
Since David Lurie, a man many readers find unappealing for much of the novel (though it is certainly possible to like him. Like all of Coetzee's novels, Disgrace is far too multi-dimensional to reduce David to a flat stock character, but from a certain common perspective, David is easy to dislike), is the narrative's focalizer, he is, predictably, also the novel's comedic epicenter, the butt of the joke. We laugh at him, at his inability to connect with the world around him, at his hypocrisy, at his pomposity, at his seemingly pathetic attempts to communicate with his daughter. Indeed, we laugh with Lucy, the only major character in the novel to openly find humor in her father's social ineptitude. The example of Lucy's laughter that comes most readily to mind, for me, occurs during the scene between David and Lucy when the former expresses his aversion to attending Petrus's party:
He speaks to Lucy. 'I have been thinking about this party of Petrus's. On the whole, I would prefer not to go. Is that possible without being rude?'
'Anything to do with his slaughter-sheep?'
'Yes. No. I haven't changed my ideas, if that is what you mean. I still don't believe that animals have properly individual lives. Which among them get to live, which get to die, is not, as far as I am concerned, worth agonizing over. Nevertheless . . .'
'Nevertheless?'
'Nevertheless, in this case I am disturbed. I can't say why.'
'Well, Petrus and his guests are certainly not going to give up their mutton chops out of deference to you and your sensibilities.'
'I am not asking for that. I would just prefer not to be one of the party, not this time. I'm sorry. I never imagined I would end up talking this way.'
'God moves in mysterious ways, David.'
'Don't mock me.' (127).
Here, Lucy's sarcastic jab verifies the reader's sense that David has rather amusingly made an about-face regarding his (and, by extension, humanity's) capacity to develop a genuine emotional bond with non-human animals. Remember, this is the same man who, in response to Bev Shaw's comment that she senses he must like animals, replies "'Do I like animals? I eat them, so I suppose I must like them, some parts of them'" (81). We smirk at the blowhard as his pompous, theory-laden talk of animals lacking souls evaporates in the harsh glare of reality. A reverse bumpkin, the city-bred intellectual gains knowledge among the most primal of nature's realities, carnivorous appetites rarely make concessions for the feelings of those beings about to be consumed.
Elsewhere, the narrator's free indirect style slips, exposing the slightest of gaps between the narrative voice and the focalizer in which humor may be located. Likewise, since the narrator makes no effort to present David in such a way as to make him appear likable, we are able (if not invited, then certainly permitted) to laugh at David's behavior. His crass treatment of Bev Shaw, for instance, is immediately something that the average reader will see as utterly uncalled for and, accordingly, we recognize that David's attitudes (towards women as well as many other topics) are often laughably out of sync with reality. I mean, it's not like he's Adonis, after all.
In other words, David is often a pompous figure and pompous people are often funny. Lurie is rather like an annoyingly self-important relative or friend at a dinner party (so you're stuck within earshot), the sort of person who enjoys the sound of his own voice, who believes he is always right when frequently he is dead wrong. We try not to listen to him, but he's loud and insistent and he keeps saying the sort of stuff we want to roll our eyes at, the sort of stuff friends and relatives may cringe at or knowingly glance at one another to wordlessly communicate something like "oh, he's at it again!"
Regarding Coetzee's didacticism, as some critics have called the author's tendency to discuss philosophical matters pertaining to animal rights, all I can say is that, on first reading, I did not feel I was being preached to in any way. Only after reading several essays claiming such a tone did I, on occasion, think to myself, "well, I suppose one might interpret this passage as a bit preachy."
Before I sign off for the night, I want to make three additional observations:
1. I have overheard people ridicule clerical jobs with rather heavy transcription components as the sort of job anyone can do. That's B.S. Having spent more than a month transcribing notes on a daily basis, I can say without a doubt, I could not do what those men and women do. Not by a long shot. It's hard work.
2. There's a critic I came across named Hans Moleman. As a child of the Simpsons generation, I cannot help but think of the diminutive, myopic character sharing the appellation every time I see his name in print. We can only hope the human Hans Moleman finds humor in his cartoon namesake's foibles.
3. I came across two articles in which a literary critic uses the word "fuck." This should be especially valuable information for people with parents claiming that "if you want to be a/n [something socially acceptable], you can't use language like that." Yes you can. And you can get a job at a major university and publish in respected journals.
Well, having finished The Rights of Desire a few days earlier than I anticipated (I gave myself, unofficially, very light reading assignments while I visited family over the holiday break), I began re-reading Disgrace, largely because I'd left the critical notes and quotes I have yet to transcribe in my office with my other, less-portable dissertation materials.
At any rate, this is at least the fourth or fifth time I've read the novel and, happily, I enjoy it as much as ever. I do find it a bit strange re-reading the book after having spent so much time reading the criticism on it because, since I have seen so many passages from the book cited and dissected by critics, my mind constantly bounces between the pleasurable act of reading a novel I enjoy a great deal and the critical discussions inspired by a given bit of prose. It is helpful, though, as I have been taking notes and making comments I hadn't necessarily thought the first few times through the text.
I also read Brooke Allen's brief discussion of Disgrace in The New Leader. Taking a somewhat "standard" view of the novel, Allen proposes that we read the novel as an allegory of the aging white figure in a new, multiracial South Africa that "has consigned David [and, presumably, the class of people of which he is a part] to the trash can." Though the essay is largely a summary of the plot, Allen does provide several interesting insights into the book, especially in relation to David's strained bond with his daughter.
For tomorrow: Transcribe or read.
Work Cited
Allen Brooke. "Unravelling a Historical Moment." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. The New Leader 13 Dec. 1999. 27-28.
I had the rather odd -- though thoroughly pleasing -- experience of reading my own published essay on Disgrace this evening. Now, this is not always a pleasant activity. We do well to remember Thomas Pynchon's apt reflections on rereading his early fiction in the introduction to Slow Learner: revisiting "anything you wrote [in the past], even cancelled checks" can be a major "blow to the ego" (3).
Fortunately, I found that I continue to agree with my earlier assessment of the book. What I wrote then strikes me now, even after having read virtually every published essay on the novel, as a strong, reasonable reading of Disgrace. So I was mercifully spared a major blow to my ego. Of course, I'd be a very poor critic (which is not to imply that I am, in fact, a good one) if I did not find flaws in my earlier work. And I did. I think I may have been a bit too generous in my assessment of David Lurie at times. For instance, I have to place myself among the many critics who have referred to Lurie's dubious relationship with Melanie Isaacs as "an affair" rather than a sexual assault.
Overall, though, I find that the essay remains a firm articulation of my initial reading of the novel and accurately reflects my current understanding of Disgrace. Naturally, with time, my interpretation of the book has become fuller and more nuanced, but fundamentally my interpretation has not altered a great deal. I continue to view Disgrace as a portrait of David Lurie's existential maturation and I think the essay does a fine job of expressing this belief. But there is more to be said.
For tomorrow: Same as today.
Works Cited
Grayson, Erik. "'A Moderated Bliss': J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace as Existential Maturation." J. M. Coetzee: Critical Perspectives, ed. by Kailash Baral. New Delhi: Pencraft, 2008. 161-169.
Pynchon, Thomas. Slow Learner: Early Stories. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985.
I'll have to keep tonight's entry brief. It's late; it's been an exceedingly long day and I am tired. I struggled to fall asleep last night so, despite having the opportunity to listen to the first fifth of Herman Hesse's Demian, the latest on my "Audiobooks to Play in the Dark When I Can't Sleep" list (having finished listening to Paul Auster's excellent Man in the Dark last week), I awoke this morning with a bit more grumpiness than usual. That said, it was not a bad day by any stretch of the imagination, the grumpiness dissipating rather quickly. But it was a busy, fatiguing day nonetheless.
As far as dissertation work goes, I reviewed Richard Brock's "Putting the Soul in Order," another of the essays in the Stirrings Still issue devoted entirely to Coetzee. Brock's text only briefly touches upon Disgrace in what amounts to an oeuvre-encompassing study of the "purgatorial" spaces in Coetzee's fiction. Brock's reading of Disgrace is consistent with a significant strain of Coetzee criticism, namely that which views bodily suffering as the means of achieving a metaphysical understanding of the human (and, perhaps, non-human animal) condition. Furthermore, Brock writes extremely readable prose, making a complex topic both accessible and comprehendible.
For tomorrow: Same as the past couple of days.
Work Cited
Brock, Richard. "Putting the Soul in Order: Purgatorial Spaces and the Role of the Writer in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee" Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature 3.1 (2006): 110-127.
I received one of the essays I requested via interlibrary loan this afternoon: Mary Leontsini and Jean-Marc Leveratto's "Online Reading Practices and Reading Pleasure in a Transnational Context: The Reception of Coetzee's Disgrace on Amazon Sites." The essay, a chapter from The Global Literary Field, is a well-written and interesting article that offers relatively little to the Coetzee scholar. As the title implies, the essay focuses on the ways in which the reception of Coetzee's novel by Canadian, American, British, and French audiences reflects the differences in reading practices around the globe.
Over the past few weeks, I skipped over a few of the essays I read, feeling too tired or too pressed for time to discuss them on the website. Although I cannot give them the attention they deserve, I would like to at least mention them.
Among the essays in the as-yet unmentioned bunch, two essays by Mike Marais --"Race, Reading, and Tolerance in Three Postapartheid Novels" and "J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and the Task of the Imagination" -- stand out as particularly strong contributions to Coetzee studies. In the former essay, Marais touches upon the pastoral elements in Disgrace as well as the significance of Lurie's "misreading" of his daughter, two extremely important foci in the commentary surrounding the novel. The second essay is, in many ways, a companion to the former. In it, Marais devotes more attention to Lurie's ultimate inability to apprehend and process Lucy's supreme alterity. Together, these two 2006 essays are essential texts for any serious student of Disgrace.
I also read Ina Grabe's interesting "Theory and Technology in Contemporary South African Writing," an essay discussing Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness and Andre Brink's The Rights of Desire in addition to Coetzee's novel. Although her analysis of Disgrace is comparatively brief, Grabe's observations about the "leveling process" David Lurie undergoes over the course of the novel is well worth reading.
Finally, I would like to mention Wendy Woodward's excellent "Dog Stars and Dog Souls: The Lives of Animals in Triomf by Marlene van Niekerk and Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee." Although human-animal relations in Disgrace has long been one of the most frequently debated themes among critics working on the novel, Woodward's essay is easily one of the most comprehensive and vital contributions to the discussion. Of especial significance is the depth of the spiritual discourse Woodward brings to her discussion. Moving beyond the superficial questions of whether or not animals have souls, Woodward looks at the ways in which animals "teach us about impermanence, suffering and death" (113).
For tomorrow: Same as today.
Works Cited
Grabe, Ina. "Theory and Technology in Contemporary South African Writing: From Self-Conscious Exploration to Contextual Appropriation." In Cybernetic Ghosts: Literature in the Age of Theory and Technology, ed. by Dorothy Matilda Figueira. Provo, UT: Brigham Young UP, 2004. 203-12.
Leontsini, Mary and Jean-Marc Leveratto. "Online Reading Practices and Reading Pleasure in a Transnational Context: The Reception of Coetzee's Disgrace on Amazon Sites." In The Global Literary Field, ed. by Anna Guttman, Michel Hockx and George Paizis. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. 165-180.
Marais, Mike. "J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and the Task of the Imagination." Journal of Modern Literature 29.2 (2006): 75-93.
---. "Race, Reading, and Tolerance in Three Postapartheid Novels." In The Responsible Critic: Essays on African Literature in Honor of Professor Ben Obumselu, ed by Isidore Diala. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2006. 253-270.
Woodward, Wendy. "Dog Stars and Dog Souls: The Lives of Dogs in Triomf by Marlene van Niekerk and Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee." Journal of Literary Studies / Tydskrif vir literatuurwetenskap 17.3-4 (2001): 90-119.
Although I have a few essays still on order through interlibrary loan, my pile of unread photocopied essays is no longer a pile. True, I have a few book chapters to read, but the endless pile is, for the first time since the spring, empty. Oh, the faux wood grain of my desk is as beautiful to me now as the face of a long-absent lover come home again!
The article I read this afternoon, Matt DelConte's "A Further Study of Present Tense Narration: The Absentee Narratee and Four-Wall Present Tense in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace," offers relatively little to the Coetzee scholar. If anything, DelConte uses Coetzee's fiction (which, despite the title, the author does not mention until halfway through the essay) to illustrate the concepts of the "absentee narratee" and "four-wall narration" he has coined for the purposes of his discussion. To be honest, I found the vast majority of the discussion to be an exercise in explaining the obvious, though there were several points in the essay where DelConte makes some thoughtful observations about Coetzee.
Among the other essays I have read recently, neither Liv Lundberg's "Mesteren fra Cape Town" nor Mary Eagleton's "Ethical Reading: The Problem of Alice Walker's 'Advancing Luna - and Ida B. Wells' and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace'" added a great deal to my understanding of the novel, though both are quite well-written and interesting. Lundeberg's essay is a wonderful piece of Norwegian literary criticism: part introductory survey, part intellectual memoir. Given the relative dearth of Norwegian-language criticism on Coetzee, "Mesteren" is an important step in ensuring Coetzee's place in that country's literary discourse. Eagleton's essay, on the other hand, is an intensely focused study of the trauma of rape as depicted in the two works mentioned in the article's title. With its theory-informed close reading of the two texts, "Ethical Reading" treats such topics as Lucy's willful silence following her rape with great insight.
Yesterday, I read Laura Wright's "'Does He Have it in Him to be the Woman?': The Performance of Displacement in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Dr. Wright, in my estimation, is one of the most readable critics working on Coetzee. Although the essay is relatively brief, Wright manages to survey much of the pre-existing critical discourse on Coetzee's novel, extract the most vital themes (animal alterity, the creative process, trauma, the sympathetic imagination, the burden of history, etc.) and weave together a wholly coherent reading of the book as a performative text in which the unknowability of the other is central, ultimately concluding that:
While one can never be the other, on an ethical level, one must continue to attempt to imagine the subjectivity of that which one is not, and, more importantly, one must continue to respect the alterity of that which cannot be imagined. (100)
For tomorrow: Read another essay, work on transcription, read a bit of The Rights of Desire, or work on the bibliography.
Works Cited
DelConte, Matt. "A Further Study of Present Tense Narration: The Absentee Narratee and Four-Wall Present Tense in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace." JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 37.3 (2007): 427-446.
Eagleton, Mary. "Ethical Reading: The Problem of Alice Walker's 'Advancing Luna - and Ida B. Wells' and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.'" Feminist Theory 2 (2001): 189-203.
Lundberg, Liv. "Mesteren fra Cape Town." NordLit 14 (2003): 109-125.
Wright, Laura. "'Does He Have it in Him to be the Woman?': The Performance of Displacement in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." ARIEL 37.4 (2006): 83-102.
Although I assumed that I would be too sleepy to read much more than a few pages of a novel yesterday evening, I decided to at least make an effort to do something more -- and ended up reading Kari Weil's "Killing Them Softly: Animal Death, Linguistic Disability, and the Struggle for Ethics" in addition to a bit of The Rights of Desire. Weil's essay, like quite a few others, views David Lurie's relationship with animals as central to an understanding of Disgrace. Although there is a good deal more to the paper, I find Weil's use of autistic-animal relations as a key to opening a discussion of pre-verbal empathy between humans and non-humans to be one of the more fascinating things I have read lately. If anything, this short article proves that, as heavily discussed a novel as Disgrace happens to be, there is plenty of room for further critical debate.
As for today, I still have another four pages of criticism to read before bed, so I am going to sign off for the evening/early morning.
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Work Cited
Weil, Kari. "Killing Them Softly: Animal Death, Linguistic Disability, and the Struggle for Ethics." Configurations 14 (2006): 87-96.
I did not enjoy today. I mean, it was a beautiful, cloudless autumn afternoon and the temperature was moderate enough to make wearing a sweatshirt as comfortable as wearing a tee-shirt. The yellows, reds, and oranges blotching the mountainsides made for a spectacular view in every direction. Birds chirruped and neighbors made pleasant small talk. The light breeze was delightful. And yet, I still managed to ruin it for myself.
At some point during the day I began reflecting on graduate school, something that rarely results in a sense of self-satisfaction, to say the least. Once the math (the number of doctoral students entering the job market, the growing percentage of non-tenured positions, graduate school rankings, the percentage of Ph.D.s with whom I am acquainted finding tenure-track jobs, the number of publications I have had, and so on) began swirling in my mind, my mood plummeted. In Looney Toons-style, I would go from frolicking around the bucolic splendor of a crisp autumn day to getting smacked squarely in the jaw with some exceedingly heavy Acme brand product. The sound of a record scratching would bring the Peer Gynt Suite to which I had so gaily been frolicking to an abrupt halt just in time to segue into a Maurice Ravel's "Prelude a la Nuit: Rhapsodie Espagnole." Clouds would then darken the skies, the wind would pick up, a desolate-sounding dog would howl mournfully in the distance, and a few heavy drops of cold rainwater would dampen my face as I trudged home.
Seriously, thinking about graduate school can be mind poison, no matter the institution one attends. That hyper-competitive job market just doesn't bode well for many of us. I mean, second-tier students tend to worry about the relative value of their credentials while top-tier students now have to wrestle with the fact that employers are increasingly skeptical about hiring them now, too (so sayeth a New York Times article the LiteraryChica sent my way a while back) because of the sort of hyper-specialization encouraged by many departments.
Still, despite the weight of the worry (and it was substantial), I brushed the fears away, tamped down the self-doubts as best I could, and read what turned out to be one of the better essays I have come across while working on Disgrace.
John Douthwaite's "Melanie: Voice and its Suppression in J M Coetzee's Disgrace" picks up quite literally where "Coetzee's Disgrace: A Linguistic Analysis of the Opening Chapter" leaves off. Focusing on chapters two through four, Douthwaite applies the same rigorous linguistic analysis to the Melanie-centered section of Disgrace as he does to the first chapter. The result of Dothwaite's work, not surprisingly, is a stunningly revealing close reading highlighting, among other things, the role of the void in Coetzee's novel as well as the linguistic activities David Lurie employs in a vain attempt at filling it. What I found most compelling in the essay, however, is Douthwaite's rather novel reading of the novel as presenting the free direct thought of Lurie (as opposed to the almost-universally accepted critical assessment of the book as having been written in an overtly free indirect mode). Given that J. M. Coetzee delivered the Tanner Lectures by reading an account of Elizabeth Costello, penned two autobiographical works in the third-person, and accepted his Nobel Prize by reading a narrative centered on Daniel Dafoe, the possibility Lurie is the "author" rather than simple focalizer of Disgrace is a compelling and thought-provoking approach to the novel, indeed. In making his case, Douthwaite nudges open several hitherto unseen (and potentially enlightening) avenues for scholarly discourse. Normally, I do not enjoy linguistic analysis, but Douthwaite is a superior scholar with a genuine gift for literary criticism, making his two essays essential reading for anyone working with Coetzee's text.
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Work Cited
Douthwaite, John. "Melanie: Voice and its Suppression in J M Coetzee's Disgrace." Current Writing 13.1 (2001): 130-161.
I'm going to try to play catch-up a bit today and discuss a few of the articles that I haven't yet mentioned.
Over the course of the past three days, I read two essays -- Gerald Gaylard's "Disgraceful Metafiction: Intertextuality in the Postcolony" and Margot Beard's Lessons from the Dead Masters: Wordsworth and Byron in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace -- dealing with the ways in which Coetzee draws upon British Romanticism to layer, enrich, and nuance his novel. Of the two, I personally found Beard's reading to be a bit more useful for my own purposes, but Gaylard's essay is an equally strong contribution to the body of criticism surrounding Disgrace. Although Gaylard does not limit his exploration of intertextuality to Coetzee's engagement with the Romantic period, he does devote the strongest sections of his essay to its prominent place in the novel. Beard, on the other hand, uses the professional specialization in the Romantic poets she shares with David Lurie to highlight, among other things, the city-country, pastoral-urban, and simple-sophisticated binaries Coetzee invokes through David Lurie's fascination with "masters" such as the rakish Lord Byron and the almost willfully quaint William Wordsworth. Her strongest observations come when Beard addresses the critical misreadings of pastoralism in several previous studies of he novel.
I also read Neville Smith's "Difference and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace," an attempt to place Coetzee's novel among a growing body of fiction commenting upon the ways in which cultural and social prejudices have displaced biologically-motivated bigotry as a means of enforcing difference and maintaining positions of power over others. Smith does a wonderful job of making his case, though the essay does seem to make the same point ad infinitum. Smith also devotes a good amount of time to a survey of the critical response to Disgrace, situating his reading squarely in the center of many scholarly discussions of Coetzee's text.
For today: see previous post.
Works Cited
Beard, Margot. "Lessons From the Dead Masters: Wordsworth and Byron in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." English in Africa 34.1 (2007): 59-77.
Gaylard, Gerald. "Disgraceful Metafiction: Intertextuality in the Postcolony." Journal of Literary Studies 21.3-4 (2005): 315-337.
Smith, Neville. "Difference and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Journal of Literary Studies 23.2 (2007): 200-216.
Well, it's been a busy few days for me. Between grading several classes worth of student essays, reading a significant chunk of A Canticle for Liebowitz for another one of my classes, and teaching for more than nine hours a day, I haven't had a whole lot of time to devote to working on my dissertation, but I did read a few brief reviews, figuring reading something small each day would be better than not reading anything.
Of the reviews I've read these past couple of days, I found Peter Ho Davies's "Truth and Consequences - J.M. Coetzee's Rigerous Tale of Guilt and Regret in South Africa," from the Chicago Tribune, to be the most interesting. In his reading of Disgrace, Davies asserts that David Lurie's "disgrace began much earlier than the public humiliation of the denounced affair" between the academic and Melanie Isaacs. By locating the beginning of Lurie's downfall prior to the opening of the novel, Davies suggests that the professor's disgrace is not, as quite a few reviewers have asserted, the result of an act of foolish Romantic bravado, but rather evidence that Lurie has, in fact, been complicit in "the long history of exploitation" to which Farodia Rassool refers during the university disciplinary meeting (Coetzee 53).
One of the stranger readings of Disgrace that I have come across is that of Mark Shechner, who describes Melanie as "the usual coed fatale," depicting the young woman as a "predator" preying on Lurie. Otherwise, the reviews I read are fairly standard interpretations of the novel. Oscar C. Villalon, for instance, reads Lurie's development in the novel from a self-centered academic to a (somewhat) compassionate veterinarian's assistant as suggestive of South Africa's potential to heal after apartheid while Elizabeth Gleick and Bob Hoover interpret the book as painfully bleak and unremittingly hopeless in its depiction of the nascent post-apartheid state.
For tomorrow: Read another essay or read a bit of The Rights of Desire.
Works Cited
Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Davies, Peter Ho. "Truth and Consequences - J.M. Coetzee's Rigorous Tale of Guilt and Regret in South Africa." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. Chicago Tribune 28 Nov. 1999. 3.
Gleick, Elizabeth. "Cries of the Displaced - A Bleak but Brilliant Novel of South Africa." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. Time 29 Nov. 1999. 82.
Hoover, Bob. Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. 7 Nov. 1999. Available online.
Shechner, Mark. "Post-Apartheid Trauma Sidetracked." The Buffalo News. Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. 28 Nov. 1999. F6+.
Villalon, Oscar C. "Hard Truths in a New South Africa." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. San Francisco Chronicle 28 Nov. 1999. Available online.
As a result of staying up so late yesterday night, I've been sleepy all day even though I slept much later than I had hoped to do. I did, however, get through another article this evening, bringing me a tiny step closer to finishing what has been an incredibly draining undertaking. As much as I love Disgrace and as interested as I am in the interpretive possibilities the novel offers, I simply cannot wait to be finished reading the criticism. Lately, I have been spending whole afternoons struggling to get through an essay. I mean, I'll read a page, get up, check email, return to the text, read two lines of the article, get up again, take a walk or a drive, find a nice place to read, read a tiny bit, get bored, get up, find a new place, and repeat. It sucks. And it's not that the criticism is lousy. I just hate reading the same things over and over. After a while, one grows numb and his or her eye's begin to wander and it's harder to absorb information.
But this, too, is something I must accept as part of the dissertation.
And so I do.
But I grumble, too. I occasionally grit my teeth as well. And once, in a particularly weak moment, I beat my breast and shouted lamentations to the heavens. Then again, I may have read that somewhere.
As far as what I have been reading, today I read Rachel McCoppin's "Existential Endurance: Resolution from Accepting the 'Other' in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace," from the special Stirrings Still issue devoted entirely to Coetzee. In it, McCoppin bypasses the critical tendency to turn towards Emmanuel Levinas's conception of the other, back to the Sartrean understanding of the concept and towards Nietzsche for an understanding of the formation of David Lurie's personal ethical system in the novel. What McCoppin does most effectively is reveal just how much the poststructuralists are indebted to the existentialists they are so often said to have superseded, especially in terms of the concept of the Other. Much of her reasoning does, however, proceed along the same general lines as many other readings of the novel: Lurie's encounters with the Other -- be they with his daughter (one of McCoppin's more inspired interpretations), the three assailants, or non-human animals -- force him to recognize the ultimate value of the Other, the necessity of relinquishing the drive to dominate that which he cannot control, and the small blessings brought about by the assumption of a humility hitherto absent from his existence. In a similar -- though explicitly Levinasian -- vein, Michael Marais concludes that the humbling "responsibility [for the Other] is an effect of [Lurie]'s loss of control over that which [he] thought [he] could control" (18). Unlike McCoppin's essay, which emphasizes Lurie's conscious decision to become a better person, Marais's text -- "Impossible Possibilities: Ethics and Choice in J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and Disgrace" -- suggests that "[a]lthough he becomes a better person in the course of the novel, he does not do so of his own volition" (10). Indeed, in learning to love despite himself, Lurie joins the ranks of the doctor in Life & Times of Michael K, Elizabeth Curren in Age of Iron, and Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg by loving the unloveable and/or unknowable: K., John, and Sergei Nechaev, respectively.
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Works Cited
Marais, Michael. "Impossible Possibilities: Ethics and Choice in J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and Disgrace." The English Academy Review 18.1 (2001): 1-20.
McCoppin, Rachel. "Existential Endurance: Resolution from Accepting the 'Other' in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature 3.1 (2006): 71-81.
If there were any doubts that an advanced degree in the liberal arts appeals to employers, I suggest you read the following announcement sent to the English graduate student listserv at my university this afternoon under the title "Job Opening":
JOB POSTING: [Company name removed for privacy] has an immediate opening for a full-time receptionist/administrative assistant. The successful applicant need not have knowledge of the window tinting industry, but must be willing and able to learn the company's trade. This position requires a personable and responsible employee with a professional attitude and outstanding phone etiquette. An understanding of scheduling, invoicing, and accounts payable is required for this busy, rewarding position.
When headhunters looking for "a full-time receptionist/administrative assistant" begin targeting people with MAs and PhDs, one cannot help but reflect upon his or her decision to attend graduate school. There is, of course, nothing wrong with a receptionist position in the window tinting industry, but from a certain jaded perspective, one has to wonder what this says about the relative value of a decade of post-secondary education in an economy like ours . . . I mean, theoretically one need not attend college to qualify him- or herself for a career in the service industry or in retail, yet many people I know with fancy-sounding degrees end up working in fields they need not have spent so much time and money in school to enter. Obviously, the psychological, intellectual, and spiritual value of an education should be enough of an incentive for an individual to attend post-secondary schools, but the reality of the situation is that the vast majority of people in the United States who attend college and graduate school with the explicit goal of obtaining a particular type of job and lifestyle theoretically only possible with an expensive and time-consuming education. And, sadly, it seems, many of these dreams will go unfulfilled despite the best efforts to succeed. This, too, is another throbbing anxiety in the mind of many a graduate student: will all this work pay off and position me for a satisfying career in academia? The answer in all its painfully unsettling glory: maybe.
And speaking of emails, I received this message yesterday:
A request you have placed:
Cape Argus 10 August 1999 Title: Coetzee thinks publicly about new SA Author: Michael Morris
TN: 339109
has been cancelled by the interlibrary loan staff for the following reason:
We have exhausted all possible sources.
There is no library who can supply this item.
I have a hard time believing that no library has a copy of the Cape Argus from less than a decade ago, so if there's anyone who might have a copy of this brief newspaper article, I would be elated if you could contact me.
As far as reading goes, I finished two articles since yesterday evening, both of which deal heavily with poststructural theory. Of the two, the essay I read this afternoon -- Zoe Wicomb's "Translations in the Yard of Africa" -- struck me as most relevant to my dissertation. In her discussion of the correlations between the act of cultural transformation and literal and figurative translation, Wicomb cuts to the heart of one of the central issues in postcolonial studies: the palimpsestic nature of cultural production. Indeed, the traces of apartheid-era society is never fully erased and, in Coetzee's book, they often foil attempts at translating experience. This, in Wicomb's estimation, can be shown to reveal "the failure of transition as a crossing over to democracy" (Wicomb). The essay I read last night, Lucy Graham's "'Yes, I am Giving Him Up': Sacrificial Responsibility and Likeness With Dogs in JM Coetzee's Recent Fiction," like so many others, deals with the connections between The Lives of Animals and Disgrace. Although Graham is one of the Coetzee scholars I most enjoy, I wasn't as impressed by this essay as I normally am. This is not to say that her essay is not very good -- it is -- but I feel that the weight of the theory she brings into the article detracts from her astute reading of the novel. Jacques Derrida, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others, each make an appearance in this brief (eleven pages!) essay. Although many academics are quite familiar with what amounts to a who's who of postmodern thought, Graham's tightly-packed essay demands a certain readerly vigilance not to get lost in the waves of complexly-wrought theoretical language running throughout the text. That said, Graham reads against the Mike Marais's Levinasian interpretation of Disgrace, arguing that Coetzee's texts "challenge the limitations of autrui and dissociation implicit in notions of transcendence," providing a slightly different (yet valuable) interpretation of the oft-cited "sympathetic imagination" at work in both Disgrace and The Lives of Animals / Elizabeth Costello (4). While I do not wholly agree with Graham's reading, I applaud her focus on the body as a site of suffering as well as the negative presence of silenced suffering in the two texts.
For tomorrow: Read another article.
Works Cited
Graham, Lucy. "'Yes, I am Giving Him Up': Sacrificial Responsibility and Likeness With Dogs in JM Coetzee's Recent Fiction." scrutiny2 7.1 (2002): 4-15.
Wicomb, Zoe. "Translations in the Yard of Africa." Journal of Literary Studies 18.3-4 (2000): 209-33.
Although I had initially planned to spend the day reading one of the longer critical articles I still have sitting around, I opted instead to read a couple of reviews on Disgrace. Normally, when I end up reading newspaper reviews, I do so out of desperation. Either I have been unable to focus on a longer essay or I have been working (for-money working) all day and haven't the time or energy left to read much more than a briefer, less scholarly-sounding text. Today, though, was different. It's only 1:30 in the afternoon, so I really can't claim that I have been struggling to read an essay all day long. Likewise, it is a Sunday, so I can hardly blame long hours in the classroom or around the conference table for not getting much done.
Instead, a friend invited me over for the afternoon to play Dungeons and Dragons, like the proper icosahedronic dice-rollers that we are. Having been a bit lonely lately, I figured, socializing might well be the ticket to ensuring a better attitude towards my own work. It certainly can't hurt.
So, I read a couple of reviews so that I could enjoy myself knowing I had gotten some work completed already. The first review, Rachel L. Swams's "After Apartheid, White Anxiety," as the title suggests, situates Coetzee 's text among "a new literature of South Africa's whites that vents and explores their fears about the post-apartheid nation" (1). Drawing comparisons to Nadine Gordimer's less negative House Gun, Swams sees Coetzee's novel as depicting the "chilling indifference" of a society in which vengefully violent acts of retribution may be exacted upon seemingly innocent white individuals like the "warm-hearted" Lucy Lurie (1). Swams's essay, it seems to me, stands out as a particularly strong introduction to a certain vein of critical concern among the South African literary establishment. Additionally, by drawing upon critics such as David Attwell and contemporary novelists such as Zakes Mda, Swams effectively presents a learned, relatively unbiased view of this branch of critical discourse in her native land. I also read Robin Vidimos's review of Disgrace which, despite misidentifying the novel's protagonist as "James Lurie," is a fairly solid reading of the text. Although not explicitly evoked, existentialism seems central to Vidimos's interpretation of the book and, accordingly, focuses on the origins and solutions to the "rudderless" Lurie's detachment (5).
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Works Cited
Swams, Rachel L. "After Apartheid, White Anxiety." The New York Times 14 Nov 1999: 4.1.
Vidimos, Robin. "Midlife Tragedy Quickly Grabs and Retains Interest." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. The Denver Post 14 Nov. 1999: F5+.
Since I haven't yet done so, I am going to use this post to mention some of the articles I never got around to discussing when my access to the internet was limited to brief sessions in crowded library computer labs as well as a few of those essays I neglected to write about when I felt too tired to type anything worth reading.
In his brief review marking the release of Disgrace in paperback, Michael Holland rather pithily writes "[c]olonialism at best is the tyranny of the paternal. Disgrace is not knowing when to let go," an observation I believe adroitly synthesizes several of the central themes running through Coetzee's narrative. Indeed, the colonial past haunts David Lurie, the man many critics view as an embodiment of apartheid-era white privilege, who struggles to adjust to the post-apartheid society into which history has thrust him. Indeed, as Tony Freemantle writes, David Lurie "no longer has control in the new social order" and, accordingly, "he cannot find his place in this unfamiliar land" (15). Furthermore, the refusal to "let go" highlighted by Holland extends beyond the political sphere, into Lurie's bedroom, where the professor's "libido . . . won't politely fade away with flagging physical appeal and status." Disgrace, then, "develops into a debate between generations," revealing the social, political, sexual, and ontological fissures separating David Lurie's generation from that of his daughter and post-apartheid South Africa in general (Adams). I also read Suzanne Rhodenbaugh's early review of the novel in which she views the "disillusionment and emptiness" David Lurie experiences as signs of an existential crisis (12). As always, I tend to agree with the existential reading, having written (and published) essays highlighting precisely this concern. All bias aside, though, Rhodenbaugh does provide one of the better American reviews of the novel, especially among the early critics.
In addition to the reviews mentioned above, I also read Agata Krzychylkiewicz's survey of Coetzee's reception in Russia, which highlights several interesting readings of Disgrace, as well as the author's other novels, especially (and, perhaps, predictably) The Master of Petersburg. The Russian critics Krzychylkiewicz cites tend to view Coetzee's narrative as both a supremely realized example of literary refinement and an extremely bleak, often painful-to-read depiction of modern life. Particularly illustrative of the Russian response to the novel is the reviewer for NaStoiaschaia literatura's comment that Disgrace is an "echellent and at the same time hopeless novel" that presents a "repugnant" world in which "[o]ne can get on . . . only when one submits to it" (qtd. in Krzychylkiewicz). Likewise, Dmitrii Olshanskii claims that, for Coetzee, "life [is] chaotic and terrifying" while the anonymous reviewer writing for Knizhnyi klub asserts that "[t]he topic of the book is as always in Coetzee's writing twisted and dizzy" (qtd. in Krzychylkiewicz).
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Works Cited
Adams, Phoebe-Lou. "Brief Reviews." The Atlantic Monthly. March 2000. Available online.
Freemantle, Tony. "The 'New South Africa': Damaged Souls Struggle For Redemption, Answers." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. Houston Chronicle 19 Dec. 1999: 15.
Holland, Michael. Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. The Observer. 23 April 2000.
Hollands, Glenn. "Sophisticated Award Winner." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. The Dispatch. 20 May 2000. Available Online.
Krzychylkiewicz, Agata. "The Reception of J. M. Coetzee in Russia." Journal of Literary Studies 21.3-4 (2005): 338-368.
Rhodenbaugh, Suzanne. "Professor Takes on the Coils of Predator, Loving Father in 'Dog's Life' Existence." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. St. Louis Post-Dispatch 12 Dec. 1999: 12.
The rather unpleasant combination of a fourteen hour work day today and a poor night's sleep last night has rendered me more or less inarticulate this evening, so you will have to excuse me if I sound a bit spaced-out. I mean, it was a good day (after all, I enjoyed my classes and the ailing loved one for whom I have been caring seems to be on the mend), but it has also been the culmination of an emotionally- and financially-draining week, so tonight's fatigue is not one a glass of soda or a cup of tea (I'm not a coffee person) could fix. Accordingly, this post will have to be yet another brief entry taking the place of the much longer piece I would prefer to write. But que sera, sera, I suppose.
Despite my obligation-crammed schedule, however, I did manage to read a pair of articles on Coetzee culled from the pages of The London Times this evening. The first, Ranti Williams's review of Disgrace, is fairly consistent with much of the initial non-South African commentary on Coetzee's novel, highlighting as it does David Lurie's transformation in the aftermath of his daughter's rape while only cursorily addressing the racial issues so prevalent in the often-negative assessments of the author's countrymen. I do appreciate Williams's rather prescient reading of sexuality in the novel as a key to understanding David Lurie's existentially dissonant position in the book, an interpretive angle largely glossed over by other reviewers and only tangentially referred to in most recent critical studies. Despite a handful of forgivable misreadings (David Lurie is not, as Williams suggests, a professor at the University of Cape Town, but rather an instructor at the fictive Cape Technical University, for instance), Williams proves to be an uncommonly observant reader, capably situating Coetzee's book within the larger context of the author's oeuvre while also closely analyzing the text and discussing the unique qualities that mark Disgrace as the beginning of a new phase in the Nobel laureate's career. I also read a short, anonymously-penned biographical essay on Coetzee written shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2003. Predictably, the author's reclusive nature receives a disproportionate amount of attention in the piece, but the article does provide a succinct overview of Coetzee's writing as well as a largely sympathetic glimpse into the mind and life of a contemporary literary giant.
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Works Cited
"Triumph of a One-Man Truth Commission." The Sunday Times [London] 5 Oct. 2003. Available online.
Williams, Ranti. "A Man's Salvation." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. The Times [London] 25 June 1999. Available online.
Having spent most of the day running errands I really wish I hadn't had to run, I was exhausted by the time I sat down to read today's essay. I knew that I would be too sleepy to read one of the handful of longer critical articles on Disgrace which I have yet to make my way through, so I attempted to read a bit of Inner Workings instead. When my attention flagged, I cracked open Doubling the Point and The Rights of Desire, but I was unable to focus on those texts either. In the end, desperate to make at least a tiny bit of progress on my dissertation, I read John Mullan's brief discussion of sex in Disgrace. Surprisingly, despite it's brevity, Mullan's review provides readers with a slew of useful insights into the nature of sex and sexuality in Coetzee's novel. Particularly relevant to discussions of David Lurie's alienation, for instance, is Mullan's observation that "sex sharpens the character's sense of separateness," an observation so profoundly obvious (at least once one hears it) that it strikes one as astonishing that so many of Coetzee's subsequent commentators have neglected to make note of it when discussing topics that would be illuminated by its inclusion.
Work Cited
Mullan, John. Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. The Guardian 15 June 2002. Available online.
For tomorrow: Read another essay or a bit of The Rights of Desire.
Well, my internet connection isn't working again, so I am typing this in my computer's word processing program and will cut and paste it into my blogging software when I can get online. Ironically -- I swear this isn't intentional -- I am listening to Face to Face's "Disconnected" while I write. Weird.
As I have mentioning repeatedly over the past few days, I have really been struggling to get through the final dozen or so articles on Disgrace. At least three-quarters of them have underlining or highlighting on the first page or two from my aborted attempts to read them. This isn't to say that the articles are poorly written or anything. It's just that I find myself saying "yeah, I know" to quite a few of the critics I have been reading lately because, to be honest, I have not been encountering much in the way of new information. You see, I've already encountered quite a few analyses of, say, Coetzee's critique of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or the role of animals in stoking David Lurie's sympathetic imagination -- and, more often than not, I have already read the arguments presented in a given article two or three times in other criticism.
Of course, there have been some very fine exceptions, articles that do shed new light on the novel and I appreciate them a great deal. This, though, sounds like more complaining, which is not my aim. If anything, I am trying to document my frustration. I want to share this with those of you who have been kind enough to share your own experiences as dissertation writers with me in case you ever find yourself in a similar predicament. I also want to write my way through the frustration. I want to be able to look back on this experience and, with the aid of these notes of exasperation, keep the distortions of memory to a minimum. That way, I can realistically say I have been here, done this and have written proof of it.
That said, I did make my way through another essay this afternoon. Admittedly, had I not had plans for dinner, I mightn't have finished my reading so early. Fortunately, I ended up having a nice time with some really wonderful people and I now have the energy to write a bit, so I will try to discuss a few of the essays I have been meaning to mention. As a caveat, I should mention that I will only discuss certain elements of the essays. Each one is considerably more complex and broader in scope than my brief entry could possibly convey and should be sought out by serious students of Coetzee.
The essay I went over this afternoon, Margot Norris's "The Human Animal in Fiction," only deals briefly with Disgrace. With particular attention to sexuality and the use of bestial metaphors to express human sexuality, Norris's study will prove quite useful to readers interested in broader issues of materialism as well as to those wanting to locate Coetzee within a tradition of human-animal representations. In a similar vein, I also read Kennan Ferguson's "I [Heart] My Dog," which like Norris's essay, considers Coetzee's treatment of animals as part of a larger trend in literary history. Consistent with what may be the orthodox interpretation of dogs in Disgrace, Ferguson views the canine presence in Coetzee's novel as a catalyst in the reformation of David Lurie's character.
Among the other articles I read over the past week, only Jane Poyner's "Truth and Reconciliation in JM Coetzee's Disgrace" deals exclusively with the novel. Typical of many essays concerned with the theme of reconciliation, Poyner reads the character of David Lurie as representative of the white male figure in post-apartheid South Africa. Where she deviates from the pack is in her refining of that reading from the general to the specific: David Lurie represents not only the while male but the white male writer. Accordingly, Poyner sees the failure of David's musical project as analogous to the white writer's difficulty in finding an appropriate voice for expressing his angst, guilt, and desire for an unobtainable closure in post-Apartheid South Africa. Similarly, Johan Jacobs discusses the ways in which the increasingly comic Byron in Italy mirrors the many reversals taking place in the novel as well as in South African society, including Petrus's displacing of the Luries' on the Eastern Cape smallholding purchased by the latter.
Works Cited
Ferguson, Kennan. "I [Heart] My Dog." Political Theory 32.3 (2004): 373-395.
Jacobs, Johan. "Writing Reconciliation: South African Fiction After Apartheid." Cross Cultures 71 (2004): 177-196.
Norris, Margot. "The Human Animal in Fiction." Parallax 12.1 (2006): 4-20.
Poyner, Jane. "Truth and Reconciliation in JM Coetzee's Disgrace." scrutiny2 5.1 (2000): 68-77.
Well, I suppose every productive day has its unproductive counterpart. And today, unlike Wednesday, was not a particularly good day for my dissertation. Although I woke up with plenty of energy and a desire to get some real work done, I ended up struggling to focus all day. No matter where I went -- restaurants, bookstores, you name it -- I could not get into a groove and now, at a quarter past midnight, I am still working on the day's article. Ugh.
As I have mentioned many, many times before, I have grown pretty tired of reading literary criticism, which I have been doing almost daily for more than three months now. Again, I realize full well that I could probably write my chapter on Disgrace without reading the remaining criticism, but I feel obliged to finish what I started. I don't like the idea of doing anything half-assed and I know that if I were to skip the last few articles, I would end up regretting it and I would undoubtedly carry that regret with me for a long, long time. So, in an effort to make finishing the criticism a bit easer for myself, I have decided to read a bit of Andre Brink's The Rights of Desire (Donkermaan) in lieu of Disgrace criticism whenever I feel I really need a break from the monotony of that particular project. Brink's novel, as many Coetzee scholars are eager to point out, takes its English title from David Lurie's statement to the university disciplinary committee that his "case rests on the rights of desire," and provides an interesting and significant intertextual reference point for readers of Disgrace. Since it appears in so many discussions of Disgrace and because the two novels deal with many of the same issues, I feel that I should at least read The Rights of Desire and, if I'm lucky, I might be able to integrate it into my chapter. We'll see.
For tomorrow: Read another article and/or a bit of The Rights of Desire.
As I mentioned yesterday, I have been supplementing the the critical essays on Disgrace that I have been reading with some reviews of the novel and I would like to use tonight's entry to briefly mention a few of these pieces. One recurring point of interest among the critics I've read recently has been, perhaps not surprisingly, the ways in which Coetzee's novel reflects and comments upon "the unreconciled dilemmas of . . . his country's predicament" (Williams). Trevor Royale, for instance, maintains that Coetzee's "political metaphors are impossible to avoid" while Michael Upchurch praises Disgrace for "admirably [taking] on the malaise of post-Apartheid South Africa." Of particular interest to several critics, notably Gail Caldwell and Stuart M. Kurland, is David Lurie's increasingly obsolescent position in the country. For both Caldwell and Kurland, the protagonist's status as an academic is especially important in its foregrounding of the inability of Western European values to make sense of post-Apartheid South Africa. The fact that, "from the moment of his arrival" in the Eastern Cape, "Lurie's intellectual tools - his scholarly pursuits, his interminable irony - are worse than useless" (Caldwell 1), highlights "the deep, unresolved conflicts of race, sex, and class" in the author's homeland as well as the widening gap between David's generation and that of his daughter (Kurland). Thus, for Michael Morris, David Lurie embodies the older generation's "responses to the dispassionate, unforgiving tide of history" in a nation where "all codes of behavior for people, black and white, have become perverted and twisted" (Grant). In the end, Coetzee's novel is a "towering" (Higgins) testament to the need for human perseverance even if, as Laurence Phelan suggests, it amounts to "a defeated acceptance of the new world order."
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Works Cited
Caldwell, Gail. Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. The Boston Globe. 14 Nov. 1999: P1+.
Grant, Katie. "A Very Foreign Country." Rev. of Disgrace, by J . M. Coetzee. The Spectator 10 July 1999.
Higgins, Charlotte. "Booker's Best Six." Mail and Guardian 23 May 2008.
Kurland, Stuart M. Rev. of Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow, Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee, and The Human Stain, by Philip Roth. Academe. July/August 2001.
Morris, Michael. "Coetzee on Shortlist for Booker Prize." Cape Argus 23 Sept. 1999.
Phelan, Laurence. "More Sinned Against Than Sinning." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. The Independent 23 April 2000.
Royle, Trevor. "Braving Cape Fear." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. The Sunday Herald 18 July 1999.
Upchurch, Michael. "Deserving Acclaim: Our Critic Closes The Book on '99 With His Top Ten Picks." The Seattle Times. 26 Dec. 1999.
Williams, Stephen. Rev. of Discharge (sic), by J. M. Coetzee. African Business Nov. 1999.
All right. Since it seems like my internet is functioning at the moment, I'll try to get a post online this evening.
Today was a remarkably productive day, surprisingly. Not only did I get myself up and out of bed relatively early, I read two articles, got quite a bit of prep work done for my classes, and hiked a beautiful mountain trail.
That said, I still have a good deal of work I want to get done before bed, so I won't write nearly as long an entry as I would like. I will, however, review some of the critical reading I have done this past week in an effort to make up for the string of "I'm too tired to write anything" entries preceding this one.
Of the critical essays I read over the past week, Louis Tremaine's "The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the Work of J. M. Coetzee" is, by far, the most interesting. Animals, Tremaine asserts, are almost always associated with death and decline in Coetzee's fiction. In his analysis, Tremaine convincingly argues that the role of animals in works such as Age of Iron, Disgrace, and Elizabeth Costello is, at least partially, aimed at addressing "that perpetually recurring question in Coetzee's writing: how to live with the knowledge of impending death" (594).
Although all of the essays I read address Disgrace, only two -- Ranajit Das's "Prophet of Pain" and Lucy Graham's "Reading the Unspeakable" -- deal exclusively with Coetzee's novel. Das's essay is peculiarly charming in its unabashed enthusiasm for Disgrace. With a reverential tone more commonly found in medieval hagiographical writing than in contemporary literary criticism, "Prophet of Pain" dismisses the significance of the "'local history' factor" so many critics have viewed as central to the novel as secondary to universal existential allegory Das sees as the book's most important aspect (219). Graham's essay, on the other hand, is intensely local in its focus. Using the widespread outrage at Coetzee's depiction of the rape of a white woman by three black assailants as her starting point, Graham discusses both David Lurie's rape of Melanie Isaacs and Lucy Lurie's rape at the hands of Pollux and his two comrades as key elements in Coetzee's subtle inversion of the racist "black peril" narratives reflecting white anxieties in post-Apartheid South Africa. Among her many insightful comments, Graham makes a compelling argument for Lucy's silence as a catalyst for the evolution of her father's sympathetic imagination.
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Works Cited
Das, Ranajit. "Prophet of Pain: J. M. Coetzee and His Novel Disgrace." Indian Literature 48.1 (2004): 165-173.
Graham, Lucy Valerie. "Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J . M. Coetzee's Disgrace." 29.2 (2003): 433-444.
Tremaine, Louis. "The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the Work of J. M. Coetzee." Contemporary Literature 44.4 (2003): 587-612.
Here's a strange phenomenon: I've been getting my work done earlier since the semester started. I'm even blogging before noon today. I mean, it makes sense. After all, now that I have classes to prepare for, my days aren't nearly as open as they've been. Now, if I want to be certain that I get my dissertation work and my prep work done every day, I need to crack open the books earlier in the morning and work later in the evening, cramming my empty space with productivity. Audiobooks help.
At any rate, thanks to the rather rude awakening I had this morning courtesy of the staccato bleat of a neighbor's car alarm, I was up a bit earlier than I would have liked. Since it took me quite a bit longer to fall asleep last night and because I was awake so early, I reasoned, I wouldn't get much reading done this evening after work and I decided to read John Banville's oft-cited review of Disgrace. Despite having to pay The New York Review of Books a whopping three dollars for the privilege of accessing the online archives (I do realise, of course, that it costs money to provide such conveniences as immediate access to half a century of text, but I was bleary-eyed and vexed by the knowledge that I would not be getting any additional sleep, so I am expressing a hyperbolic exasperation for comedic -- albeit as unfunny a variety as possible -- effect), I found the essay well worth the effort of obtaining (you know, a click here, a click there . . . real tough stuff).
All joking aside, The New York Review of Books is undoubtedly one of the best resources out there for people researching contemporary literature and John Banville is a fantastic, erudite novelist in his own right and a first-rate critic to boot. Though Banville's assessment of the novel is largely a positive one, he does seem to feel that there is a disjuncture between Disgrace's opening segment and the longer middle section devoted to David's time on the smallholding with Lucy. Indeed, Banville appears to rate Coetzee's account of the Luries' time together as one of the author's finest, most provocative pieces of writing. Significantly, Banville pays particularly close attention to the author's treatment of Petrus, rightfully reading the man as the novel's most fully realized -- and potentially disturbing -- character:
For all his taciturnity, Petrus is perhaps the most convincing character in the book. In his strength, his tenacity, his peasant slyness, and his ruthlessness, he represents something as ancient and elemental as the land itself, yet never does he become a mere symbol; craggy and dangerous, he is, as his name implies, the rock on which, for better or worse, a new South Africa will be built.
Elsewhere, Banville astutely notes what many fellow critics have not been able to locate within the novel, namely a sense of humor. From the novel's first sentence, which Banville suggests opens "with what might be a sly wink" to the book's culminating scene of canine euthanasia, Coetzee lightens the gloom with discreet humor, even "allow[ing] himself now and then a Dantesque wan smile." Indeed, satire and irony do permeate the narrative, though in a muted, "moderated" sort of way.
I'd write more, but I have some chores to get done between now and my next class . . .
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Work Cited
Banville, John. "Endgame." Rev. of Disgrace, by J . M. Coetzee. The New York Review of Books 47.1. Available online.
Since I'm planning on spending the rest of the day preparing for classes, running errands, and getting a little bit of exercise, I'm going to post an extremely rare early afternoon blog entry.
I just finished reading Daniel L. Medin's excellent "Trials and Errors at the Turn of the Millennium: On The Human Stain and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace," which I consider to be one of the better comparative essays I have come across in quite some time. Though the parallels between South Africa's most decorated novelist and the man who has become, arguably, the United States' most celebrated contemporary writer are undeniably easily spotted, Medin's essay is a valuable contribution to the critical discourse surrounding both millennial novels. In it, Medin examines the ways in which both Coetzee and Roth, via the private and public trials of David Lurie and Coleman Silk, critique the often thoughtless waves of political correctness and sanctimonious scapegoating sweeping through academia and, by extension, contemporary South African and American society.
For tomorrow: Read another article.
Work Cited
Medin, Daniel L. "Trials and Errors at the Turn of the Millennium: On The Human Stain and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Philip Roth Studies 1.1 (2005): 82-92.
All right. Here I am, fifteen minutes into September, still working my way through the criticism on Disgrace, a task I had initially hoped to have completed no later than 11:59 PM on August 31.
At any rate, in between re-reading Waiting for Godot and Oryx and Crake and watching YouTube videos featuring Ralph Nader (let him in the debates, already!), I managed to read Diane Green's "'A Man's Best Friend is His Dog': Treatments of the Dog in Jane Eyre, Kate Greenville's The Idea of Perfection, J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, and Jean Winterson's 'The 24 Hour Dog.'" Green's essay, while often interesting, strikes me as perhaps a bit too presumptive, often assuming the validity of highly metaphoric readings of particular scenes in Coetzee's novel without providing any real evidence to convince a healthily skeptical reader of such validity. Not surprisingly, given the article's title, dogs are given an uncommonly -- and often contradictory -- set of metaphoric meanings ranging from black Africans (149) to white Africans (150), Indeed, Green argues, "[a]t different times and from different perspectives the dog in this novel is symbolic of every character and race" because of "how radically the position of underdog can change" (151). While I do not find all of her arguments convincing, I do think Green provides us with a strong reading of David Lurie's character as one of diminishing value, drawing interesting parallels between the disgraced academic, post-Apartheid South African society, and the abandoned bulldog, Katy.
For tomorrow: Read another article.
Work Cited
Green Diane. "'A Man's Best Friend is His Dog': Treatments of the Dog in Jane Eyre, Kate Greenville's The Idea of Perfection, J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, and Jean Winterson's 'The 24 Hour Dog.'" English 52 (2003): 139-61.
In between shopping, visiting friends, and grumbling to myself over the Bengals' cutting of Rudi Johnson, Deltha O'Neal, and Willie Anderson, I read Georgie Horrell's "Post-Apartheid Disgrace: Guilty Masculinities in White South African Writing." Horrell's essay situates Coetzee's novel within a discourse concerned with the intersection of whiteness and gender in contemporary South Africa. Drawing on key works of male and whiteness studies, Horell views Disgrace as Coetzee's contribution to the burgeoning debate on the nature of white male identity in the new dispensation of his native land. Like many critics, Horrell views David Lurie as the embodiment of South African men struggling with their own increasing sense of irrelevance and feelings of guilt for having benefitted from apartheid.
Before I sign off for the evening, I would also like to mention a few of the essays I read last week. The first, Tim Trengrove-Jones's review of Andre Brink's The Rights of Desire, compliments Horrell's essay by reading Coetzee's novel as well as that of his friend and colleague as depictions and analyses of the "decline and diminishment" of white males of David Lurie's generation (131). In the second essay, Michael S. Kochin perceives "[t]he new inverted order" of South Africa, "in which blacks act as colonial exploiters of their former white overlords" as "offer[ing] no greater hope than the white racial colonialism it replaces" (6). Typical of such readings, Kochin's essay views Petrus as emblematic of the same old problems dressed in new clothes. Finally, in comparing and contrasting Disgrace with William Faulkner's "Barn Burning," Ruth Cook sees David Lurie as responding to a South African society similar to the postbellum Southern American landscape of Abner Snopes. Through a series of parallels, Cook's essay proceeds to demonstrate the ways in which the two obsolescent white men confront a newly integrated landscape in which white privilege has begun to disintegrate. Whereas Snopes responds violently, Cook argues, Lurie merely acquiesces silently and without protest, fading into the irrelevance he has come to expect and accept.
For tomorrow: Read another article.
Works Cited
Cook, Ruth. "Fire and Disgrace in the South: Faulkner's Snopes Meets Coetzee's Lurie." Tennessee Philological Bulletin 44 (2007): 37-45.
Horrell, Georgie. "Post-Apartheid Disgrace: Guilty Masculinities in White South African Writing." Literature Compass 2.1 (2005): 1-11.
Kochin, Michael S. "Postmetaphysical Literature: Reflections on J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Perspectives on Political Science 33.1 (2004): 4-9.
Trengrove-Jones, Tim. "Not Irredeemably Disgraced?" Rev. of The Rights of Desire, by Andre Brink. Current Writing 12.2 (2000): 131-134.
Here's a shitty thing about being a grad student: You can spend the better part of the day running errands, catching up on chores, and exercising . . . and still end up feeling unaccomplished. It's weird. I feel as if I have been lazy whenever I spend a lot of time running around, actively going about my daily business and I feel accomplished when I spend a good chunk of an afternoon reclining in bed, reading a book.
That's backwards, man.
Backwards though it may be, that's how I feel this evening after having devoted much of my day to non-academic pursuits. I suspect some of this feeling stems from the fact that, with the new semester underway, I have less time to complete more brain work. Still, though, it sucks.
I suppose I am also somewhat disappointed with myself because, in my heart, I had wanted to read a longer essay than I ended up reading. Ah, the petty worries of the bourgeois, huh?
What I did end up reading today was Salman Rushdie's review of Disgrace, republished in Step Across This Line as "J. M. Coetzee." Now, I have always found Rushdie's book reviews to be uncommonly insightful, but I really think he dropped the ball with Coetzee's novel. Weirdly, for an author so concerned with the freedom of expression, Rushdie seems to believe that a writer has certain obligations to his readers, namely that the novelist must "provide the reader with the insight lacked by the characters" in the novel, lest the book "merely become a part of the darkness it describes" (297). With regard to Disgrace, Rusdie seems to feel that Coetzee's narrator should shed revelatory light on the problems of post-apartheid South African society rather than simply depict a series of troubling circumstances taking place within a specific place and time.
This is, of course, reminiscent of Nadine Gordimer's criticism of Coetzee. Both seem to think Coetzee should say something redeeming or illuminate a path out of the murk of the post-Apartheid era. That's a bit unfair, in my opinion. To me, Rusdie fails to consider the value of presenting such darkness. Disgrace is a novel that works its way under the reader's skin, that unsettles one. We want answers and Coetzee does not provide them. Instead, he poses a question. He presents us with a problem and, like any good teacher, expects us to find our own answer(s).
Rushdie accuses Coetzee of failing to shed light on a prickly historical situation, on simply presenting us with a fictional version of what is already happening. It's funny. So many people have attacked Coetzee for refusing to situate his fictions in recognizable places in the present day. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't sort of situation.
I think Disgrace has proven its worth by sparking the sorts of debate it has. It's unreasonable to expect an artist to be a visionary capable of leading us out of error (though, undoubtedly, some writers have done so). I don't doubt that J. M. Coetzee could make suggestions about how to fix South Africa, but I think he does us a greater service by giving us a text that has motivated scholars, politicians, everyday citizens, black, whites, South Africans, non-South Africans, men, and women to discuss why Disgrace is so bleak, to take up the difficult issues the novel touches upon, and attempt to solve the problems they pose.
Although there's certainly much more to be said, I want to move on and mention another couple of articles I read last week. As I mentioned previously, I really enjoyed Jonathan Lamb's "Modern Metamorphosis and Disgraceful Tales." In it, Lamb uses Disgrace as a starting point for a lengthy and penetrating analysis of and meditation on the nature of artistic representations of the sympathetic imagination. While the section on Disgrace forms only a small part of Lamb's essay, the critic provides Coetzee's readers with several important insights into the mechanisms of sympathy in the novel. I was particularly impressed with Lamb's analysis of Elizabeth Costello's identification of a mutual appreciation for and understanding of the fear of death as the basis for sympathy, an analysis that sheds light on David Lurie's transformation while at the clinic. Extending that fear to an apprehension of pain, Lamb writes:
What we sympathize with in the presence of pain is the fantasy of our being in pain, too. The solidity of identity hampers spiritual transmigration and cuts off any possibility of speaking for another being or as another being. Coetzee's idea of disgrace is intended to dismantle that barrier. Disgrace is a collapse of the ego induced by pain and humiliation so severe that the acute sense of dispossession and self-disgust accompanying it is not a hypothesis or fantasy but a brutal expulsion from familiar thoughts into presentiments so alien, so unconsoling, and vivid that they could belong to someone of something else. (138)
Hmm . . . I rather like the idea that the subject of so much critical debate -- the meaning of disgrace -- is, essentially, on a continuum with the debates central to the Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello.
There's loads more to say about Lamb, but I haven't the sort of time to write much more than I have. At any rate, the essay is brilliant from start to finish and covers a good deal more than Coetzee.
Jane Taylor's wonderful review of Coetzee's novel, by contrast, views Disgrace as a reflection of "the failure of a Western liberal tradition premised upon an 18th century model of philosophical sympathy" (25). Both Taylor and Lamb, in my opinion, are among the most indispensable voices in the ongoing debate on Coetzee's treatment of the sympathetic imagination.
One final essay I would like to briefly mention tonight is Annie Gagiano's "Adapting the National Imaginary: Shifting Identities in Three Post-1994 South African Novels," which only cursorily references Disgrace. Typical of many South African commentators, Gagiano feels "Coetzee's novel endorses and legitimises a number of prevalent stereotypes - particularly in its depiction of racial identities (and shifting roles) within the dispensation following the formal end of apartheid rule" (814). I think many students of Coetzee should be familiar with some of post-Apartheid South Africa's other literary treatments and Gagiano's essay provieds a nice way to situate Coetzee in a larger, localized context.
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Works Cited
Gagiano, Annie. "Adapting the National Imaginary: Shifting Identities on Three Post-1994 South African Novels." Journal of Southern African Studies 30. 4 (2004): 811-824.
Okay, so I finally sit myself down with the intention of discussing some of what I've been reading the past few days and, just as I begin typing, I find myself suddenly feeling much, much more sleepy than I thought I would. I was up pretty late last night re-reading the Book of Revelation, preparing for what ended up being a lively classroom discussion this afternoon. Between spending the wee hours of the morning envisioning rivers of blood and other bits of Judeo-Christian eschatology and waking up early to prepare for classes this morning, I didn't get nearly enough sleep, so you'll have to bear with me if tonight's post is a little disorganized.
That said, I would like to mention two of the articles I've read before succumbing to sleep:
Brenna Moremi Munro: "Queer Democracy: J. M. Coetzee and the Racial Politics of Gay Identity in the New South Africa." Like Elleke Boehmer's essay, Munro's study of Coetzee's fiction finds the author's strikingly candid descriptions of homoerotic longing in Boyhood to be a compelling point of departure for an examination of queer themes in both Boyhood and Disgrace. Although I initially found some of Munro's reading to be a bit unconvincing, I think she makes some really interesting observations, especially in relation to "Twilight at the Globe Salon," the fictional play in which Melanie Isaacs performs in Disgrace. Read allegorically, Munro suggests, gay identity may form part of Coetzee's commentary on race relations and alterity in South African society.
Patrick Smith: "'I Wrote Books About Dead People': Art and History in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." This extremely brief bit of commentary looks at the ways in which Coetzee's book presents the failure of artistic endeavors to improve the bleakness of life in post-Apartheid South Africa.
I hope to use some of my not-so-sleepy weekend hours to review a few more essays at greater length.
On a final note, I would like to draw my readers' attention to two particularly thoughtful comments posted by Mattias earlier this afternoon. Here is my response to the first comment:
"Hello, Mattias!
Thank you for what is probably the single most thoughtful comment I have received since beginning this blog project. Indeed, you cut right to the heart of several extremely key issues.
Firstly, I think many readers would agree with your first paragraph. Levinas, of course, figures prominently in several discussions of Coetzee's fiction and the impossibility of the colonial masculine subject to confront the other, as you suggest, is undoubtedly a concern as early as Dusklands.
Furthermore, I completely agree with you regarding Coetzee's "cold eye." I cannot imagine that a writer as text-conscious as Coetzee could possibly miss the currents you speak of. For someone as notoriously deliberate as Coetzee, one can only assume that he is only too aware of the implications of such thematic ground. This is, I think, precisely what interests several of the critics I've mentioned (Boehmer, Munro). Why he chooses to broach the subject when he does really seems to interest some readers. Munro, in particular, sees Coetzee's willingness to discuss gay themes in a time of tumultuous social upheaval as an especially important detail.
Of course, with a writer as deliberate and intelligent as Coetzee, it is difficult to say with any certainty "this is a fiction" and "that is true." His texts often blur these categorical distinctions to such an extent that one must necessarily reflect on the very natures of narrative and knowledge. Also, in Boyhood (and later, during the episode in Youth when John has an awkward homosexual liaison), the reader is struck by the candor with which a famously reclusive author describes extremely personal encounters. This surprise, one must assume, is at least part of Coetzee's intent, for he must be aware of his reputation as standoffish and reticent. Thus, one might assume that Coetzee is playing with the notion of authorship. The public's perception of a writer as intensely private as Coetzee seems unable to accommodate such bold honesty. Then again, given the general belief that Coetzee's memoirs are fictionalized, one cannot help but to wonder if these are fictional episodes intended to bring about such confusion. Add to this Coetzee's comments on confessional narratives and you have one incredibly ambiguous, unsettling book...which, I suspect, is precisely the author's intent. That unsettling feeling, after all, runs through the entirety of Coetzee's oeuvre and forces us to ask the sort questions you raise.
As for the "grotesque" eroticism, I do think Coetzee's texts present an uncommonly bleak view of sex. There is little joy to be found in any of the trysts in the author's work and violence is frequently a major theme. You raise an interesting point: does Coetzee drain these scenes of their essence and shock value in order to say something about the ways in which their real-world counterparts are treated? Quite possibly. There are, certainly, many readers who would agree with you.
"Well, I do try to add some of my views from time to time, but the blog is more of an attempt to document the process of writing a dissertation than it is to present my opinions on Coetzee. Also, to be honest, I have kept myself from discussing the novels largely because I have so much to say and not nearly enough time to say it. I often intended to reflect upon the books but, as one who teaches full time as well as works on his dissertation, I found that I simply lacked the hours it would take me to express myself. I do, however, have an old review of Disgrace on this site, written a few years ago when I first read the novel.
As for Coetzee's style...good Lord, what a question! I mean, there are certain elements that permeate many (if not all) of his books: linguistic and semiotic meditations, for instance, as well as literary allusions and metanarrative strategies, but the prose is often very different from one book to the next. You have the insane verbiage of Eugene Dawn, the Faulkneresque density of Magda in In the Heart of the Country and the ever-so-slightly accented prose of Juan Coetzee in Diary of a Bad Year.
As for David Lurie's language. . .I can certainly see instances where one might say "hmm." I mean, I think Lurie can be read satirically, though I am not certain if he is intended to be so. If anything, I believe Coetzee does satirize academia (think of Elizabeth Costello's reflections on the role of the university) in several of his books, especially in Disgrace, so it would certainly be well within the realm of possibility that Lurie is, at least partially, satirical. Perhaps not so much so as, say, Jacobus Coetzee, but he does come across as pathetic, out-of-touch, and petty at times, traits often given to satiric characters.
Your final question is a difficult one. Is Coetzee's style character-specific? Well, yes and no. You're right: each of his novels has a certain academic quality, a certain linguistic deliberateness but his characters do, often subtly, differ from each other. Paul Rayment, for instance, speaks a rather proper English similar to Juan Coetzee's because both men are foreign-born residents of Australia. Magda's vocabulary seems to burst with her desire to prove herself worthy of being preserved. You can almost feel her trying to present herself as something she wishes to be but does not necessarily believe herself to be. Jacobus Coetzee's words are clearly the bombastic hot-air balloons of a pompous, self-righteous buffoon while the Magistrate's language belies a gentle disposition quite different from that of, say, the narrator of Life and Times of Michael K, who describes the epitome of gentle as he becomes a pastiche of Kafka's Hunger Artist. And there's a certain indignation that's always just beneath the surface of the frustrated Susan Barton's prose while the narrator of The Master of Petersburg seems geared to describing the Dostoevsky in such a way as to heighten the reader's disgust (think of the choice to include descriptions of food flying out of the man's mouth, for instance).
Unfortunately it is quite late, so I will have to cut this short, but I hope I made at least a little sense."
For tomorrow: Read another article.
Works Cited
Munro, Brenna Moremi. "Queer Democracy: J. M. Coetzee and the Racial Politics of Gay Identity in the New South Africa." Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 10.1 (2003): 209-225.
Smith, Patrick. "'I Wrote Books About Dead People': Art and History in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Notes on Contemporary Literature 34.5 (2004): 6-8.
The remainder of my reading consisted of relatively brief articles and reviews. In "J. M. Coetzee's Cultural Critique," Harald Leusmann provides a reading of the novel that would likely fit under the umbrage of what Marais terms an "orthodox response," viewing the novel as a reflection of "the collective mood of present-day South Africa's white population at the end of the dark twentieth century" (60). As is common with such readings, Leusmann regards Lurie's development over the course of the novel as a journey of self-discovery in which the protagonist eventually realizes that loving the other is more rewarding than the brand of self-love with which he begins the book. In Sarah Lyall's brief article on Coetzee's second Booker Prize, the critic briefly reviews the same ground as Leusmann. David Attwell, in his excellent review of Disgrace, the critic delivers what amounts to one of the most definitive readings of the novel, emphasizing many of the issues Leusmann and Lyall consider as well as highlighting (among other things) the linguistic, sexual, and historical ideas so many later critics have elaborated on. As is the case with much of Attwell's work, "Coetzee and Post-Apartheid South Africa" is required reading for any student of Coetzee. Sarah Ruden's brief review of Coetzee's novel, while short, draws attention to the spiritual aspect of the novel several later critics discuss at greater length when she notes that the "novel brings to mind the theology of kenosis, the self-emptying necessary for spiritual growth." In "After the Fall," Michael Gorra praises Coetzee for his brave willingness to depict "an almost unrelieved series of grim moments" and, presciently, implies that the novel will likely bring the author the Nobel he would eventually win in 2003.
For tomorrow: Read another article.
Works Cited
Attwell, David. "Coetzee and Post-Apartheid South Africa." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. Journal of Southern African Studies 27.4 (2001): 865-867.
Gorra, Michael. "After the Fall." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. New York Times 28 Nov. 1999: BR7+.
Leusmann, Harald. "J. M. Coetzee's Cultural Critique." World Literature Today 78.3 (2004): 60-63.
Lyall, Sarah. "J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace Wins Booker Prize." New York Times 26 Oct. 1999. Available online.
Ruden, Sarah. Rev. of Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee. Christian Century 16 Aug. 2000. Available online.
Today was one of those days where I ended up sleeping in until, like, five in the afternoon. To make matters worse, I actually went to bed at -- get this -- 6:30 last night, so I lost about a day. Admittedly, I did wake up a few times and I did use the three or four waking hours to read and eat and such, but I still slept at least eighteen out of the past twenty-four hours! Save for a few exceptionally rare instances of extreme illness or travel-induced fatigue, I haven't come close to that sort of percentage in a quarter century. Oddly, those precious few hours of wakefulness proved to be among the most productive I have had all summer in terms of reading.
Speaking of reading, I recently returned to the indexing services I'd used when I first began collecting the criticism on Coetzee. Expecting to find perhaps two or three additional articles, I plugged in the familiar keywords ("Coetzee" and "Disgrace") and was stunned to find that, in the three months since I started the reading, another dozen or so articles have made the indexes and, as a result, my reading list has grown longer. I'd be lying if I said I was ecstatic. I have been really looking forward to a change of pace from reading so much academic writing, even if it meant beginning the equally challenging and trebly stressful process of chapter writing. But I have consoled myself with the knowledge that, when I teach Disgrace later on this semester, I will come across as fairly well-prepared. I have also been allowing myself the luxury of reading Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life just to remember what it feels like to pick a book up, buy it because I want to read it and read it because it interests me. I'd almost forgotten what a joy it can be to read a book when motivated solely by the desire to learn about a topic, without having to worry about deadlines, note-taking, cross-referencing and the like.
Although it may seem obvious, I really want to emphasize the importance of reading for fun, especially for those of us who have become, for lack of a better classification, professional readers. Often, what had once been solely a source of joy has become toil. It's important to remember what it was like to want to read when you feel like you have to read. The other night, I caught myself sitting up well past my bedtime, thoroughly exhausted but unable to stop reading Azerrad's book. And there was a moment when I sat there and realized that I had not felt so compelled to read in a long time (though, admittedly, there was a similar sense of not wanting to put the book down when I was reading Life & Times of Michael K). Forgetting that feeling, I think, would be a tragedy.
When I wasn't reading for pleasure (or preparing for a new semester or entertaining family or fixing up my home or sleeping way more than I should have), I continued reading the seemingly endless pile of criticism on Disgrace.
The essay I found most interesting, Elleke Boehmer's "Coetzee's Queer Body," doesn't actually discuss Disgrace at length. Perhaps because the subject matter Boehmer tackles has not figured into nearly any of the essays I have read on Coetzee, I found her exploration of the homoerotic undertones of the author's work refreshingly original. Beginning with the "provocative" fascination the young John Coetzee of Boyhood feels towards the legs of his male classmates, Boehmer traces an undeniably homoerotic streak throughout much of Coetzee's writing and address many of the important questions such content raises for readers of "a writer usually assumed to be unquestioningly heterosexual." For Boehmer, Coetzee's characters, seem to be drawn to a Grecian ideal of bodily perfection privileging the male body and viewing the female form as "soft."At the heart of her reading, therefore, is what Boehmer perceives as Coetzee's misogynistic inability or refusal to identify with the female other, especially apparent in Disgrace (when David Lurie cannot understand Lucy's perspective) and Elizabeth Costello, though Age of Iron also figures in her discussion. Since Boehmer's essay is merely an early attempt at addressing "the relative paucity of queer readings of [Coetzee's] work," the critic cannot be expected to do much more than scratch the surface of what may well provide the groundwork for someone else's dissertation or monograph. Still, readers of Boehmer's essay will surely benefit from a reading that immediately encourages us to consider several themes in Coetzee's oeuvre in a new light. Think, for example, of the sheer dissatisfaction of heterosexual intercourse in Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Disgrace, and Slow Man. Likewise, the Magistrate's fascination with the barbarian girl's legs in Barbarians may be worth revisiting.
I also read Michael Marais's "Very Morbid Phenomena: 'Liberal Funk', the 'Lucy-Syndrome' and JM Coetzee's Disgrace," in which the critic reads against the "orthodox response to the novel" as "exemplifying whites' acceptance of their peripherality in the 'new' South Africa" (32). Drawing on G. W. F. Hegel's understanding of power relations, affirmation, and recognition between the dominant and subservient, Marais views Coetzee's novel as an attempt to halt the historical "cycle of domination and counter-domination" in which Lucy Lurie finds herself (35). Thus, where many critics view Lucy's response to her rape as a disturbing acquiescence, Marais attempts to show how strongly self-aware Lucy deliberately cultivates a sense of community and equality in her relationship with Petrus by treating her rape as she does. Still, like Magda's tumultuous relations with Hendrik and Klein-Anna in In the Heart of the Country, Lucy's relationship to Petrus does not gel the way she hopes it will. Instead, "what Coetzee sketches out in this text is a failed dialectic of recognition" in which Petrus continues the cycle Lucy attempts to halt (36). Despite this failure, however, Marais believes Disgrace raises questions about the "endless struggle for affirmation" and recognition "that determines colonial and post-colonial history" and encourages readers to "think beyond conventional antinomies" and "imagine possibilities of being and belonging with difference that are excluded by these dualisms" (38).
I read Brian Worsfold's brief "Post-Apartheid Transculturalism in Sipho Sepamla's Rainbow Journey and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace" this evening and, despite its brevity, I found the essay to be a valuable contribution to the critical discourse surrounding Coetzee's novel. Worsfold's reading is of the allegorical variety, perceiving "David Lurie's quasi-tragic fall grace [as] Coetzee's symbolization of white disempowerment in post-apartheid South Africa" (91). Although such readings are quite common, the emphasis Worsfold places on Lurie's sexuality as a symbol is much less common and well worth noting.
Since I have a string of extremely busy days coming up on the horizon, I won't post a "for tomorrow" assignment since I may not post another entry for a few days. In its stead, I will simply announce my intention to keep reading essays on or by Coetzee until I have the chance to sit down again.
Work Cited
Worsfold, Brian. "Post-Apartheid Transculturalism in Sipho Sepamla's Rainbow Journey and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Society in a 'Post'-Colonial World. Geoffrey V. Davis, Peter H. Marsden, Benedicte Ledent, and Marc Delrez, eds. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. 89-94.
I had hoped to read one of the longer essays on Disgrace this evening after I finished some housecleaning and socializing. Unfortunately, I seem to have come down with one of those colds that don't quite qualify as "bad," but nevertheless make reading and other such activity difficult.
Since I didn't want today to be a total washout in terms of dissertation work, I decided to read James Hynes's "Sins of the Father," one of the more negative assessments of Coetzee's novel. Although Hynes finds the first section of the book "riveting," he faults Coetzee for lapsing into didacticism in the final three quarters of the novel (1). Declaring that the book "has a Calvinist sternness" and "a whiff of brimstone" in its "joylessness," Hynes wishes "for a recognition that life, even in the moral and political morass of post-apartheid South Africa, is not solely a moral obstacle" as he perceives Coetzee to present it (1).
Such a reading is fairly typical and, to be fair, more than a little understandable. Disgrace is, certainly, a novel that presents an austere and bleak picture of life, but I disagree with Hynes's statement "that Coetzee seems to lack . . . a profound sense of comedy" (1). True, the novel is not a laugh-a-minute joke-fest, but there is undeniably some humor in seeing Lurie's quixotic operatic aspirations reduced to the tinny plucking of notes on a child's toy banjo. Likewise, if we view Lurie as the less-than-exemplary man he is, much of the novel (recall his pitying attitude towards Bev Shaw during their tryst in the animal clinic) can be read satirically. Still, the humor is of a very thin variety and quite a few readers share Hynes's reaction to the novel.
For tomorrow: Same as today.
Work Cited
Hynes, James. "Sins of the Father." Rev. of Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee. Washington Post 16 January 2000: X1+.
I read Kai Easton's "Coetzee's Disgrace: Byron in Italy and the Eastern Cape c. 1820" this evening and really haven't much to say about the essay. If anything, I'm grateful to Easton for providing me with a bit of a break from reading "straight" literary criticism since she devotes a significant portion of the text to a survey of historical and artistic depictions of the Salem region of the Eastern Cape. Although Easton does acknowledge that Rita Barnard, Grant Farred, and Gareth Cornwell have all made significant contributions to the critical discussion surrounding Coetzee's decision to place Lucy's smallholding in the vicinity of Salem-Grahamstown, she feels critics have largely neglected the ways in which the story of Lord Byron's time in Ravenna relates to a region of the Eastern Cape weighed down by the burden of history. Admitting that linking "these two seemingly unrelated plots" may strike readers as peculiar, Easton proceeds in her reading despite sensing that "[t]hese two story-lines may only be tangentially linked by intersecting facts and dates, empirical histories and a network of coincidences and geographical placements" (113, 134). In fact, it occasionally seems as if Easton tries a bit too hard to establish such links. There are undeniably several similarities between the brand of European Romanticism we (perhaps erroneously) associate with Lord Byron and the hyperbolic idealism with which the Eastern Cape has been depicted but the connection remains a loose one. Still, despite relying perhaps a bit too heavily on coincidental points of convergence between the history of the Eastern Cape and Lord Byron's life, Easton's essay does highlight several very interesting aspects of Coetzee's novel and is a valuable companion to the aforementioned studies by Barnard, Cornwell, and Farred.
For tomorrow: Read an article on Disgrace, a bit of Inner Workings, or work on the bibliography.
Work Cited
Easton, Kai. "Coetzee's Disgrace: Byron in Italy and the Eastern Cape c. 1820." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 42.3 (2007): 113-130.
I am pleased to report that the once-towering pile of Disgrace criticism sitting on my desk has shrunk considerably over the course of the summer. I always knew the amount of criticism on Disgrace would dwarf the amount devoted to Age of Iron, The Master of Petersburg, Elizabeth Costello, and Slow Man, but this has been an epic struggle for me. I mean, after a while, an overwhelming sense of deja vu hits you and you begin to feel as if you have already read what you're reading at the moment. Usually, when that feeling hits me, I moan and groan to myself and move on, hoping that what seems the same is actually different. Today, however, I discovered that a full three of the "unread" essays I had sitting before me were really, truly versions of essays I had already read. Indeed, while titles differed a bit and a few sentences were added here and there and a couple of phrases were reworded, the essays were, in fact, the same. Oh, I was delighted . . . I am now sixty pages further into my reading than I was earlier in the day and I didn't even have to put effort into it!
Anyway . . .
Of the essays I reviewed over the past couple of days that were not slightly modified versions of themselves, two (Gareth Cornwell's "Disgraceland: History and the Humanities in Frontier Country" and Ron Charles's "A Morality Tale With No Easy Answers") were articles that I had originally read several years ago when researching my first article on Disgrace, so I was not wholly unfamiliar with the terrain. At any rate, I do not hesitate to say that Gareth Cornwell stands alongside Rita Barnard as one of the Coetzee critics I most enjoy reading. His prose is extremely accessible, his foci interesting, and his research comprehensive. In "Disgraceland," Cornwell contextualizes Coetzee's novel by juxtaposing events in the book with historical accounts of Salem village and Grahamstown, highlighting several thought-provoking parallels between the relationship of the indigenous Xhosa inhabitants of the area with the European settlers and the interactions of blacks and whites in Disgrace. The essay also includes an exploration of the novel's intertextual relationship with "The Humanities in Africa," foregrounding the limitations of the values bestowed by a (romanticized) European past in contemporary South Africa.
Charles's review, while brief, does an admirable job of highlighting many of the novel's key themes.
Finally, the third essay that I read, Tim McIntyre's "Autobiography and Confession in Boyhood, Youth, and Disgrace," focuses primarily on Coetzee's autobiographical writing. Although he only briefly discusses the novel, McIntyre argues that Disgrace foregrounds the necessity of selfless love so painfully absent in the young John of the memoirs: "[w]hat is central to Disgrace are the same issues that are paramount to the Confessions of St. Augustine: the slow growth of love in the heart of the protagonist and the impersonal passion for truth that drives the writing" (177).
For tomorrow: More reading.
Works Cited
Charles, Ron. "'A Morality Tale With No Easy Answers." The Christian Science Monitor (Boston) 10 November 1999: 20.
Cornwell, Gareth. "Disgraceland: History and the Humanities in Frontier Country." English in Africa 30.2 (2003): 43-59.
McIntyre, Tim. "Autobiography and Confession in Boyhood, Youth, and Disgrace." J. M. Coetzee: Critical Perspectives. Kailash C. Baral, ed. New Dehli: Pencraft International, 2008. 170-178.
Well, today sort of made up for yesterday. Whereas I spent the better part of Wednesday afternoon sleeping and the majority of the evening procrastinating, I finished my work relatively quickly today and, despite playing computer games for a few hours, I fit some exercise and housecleaning into my schedule, too.
At any rate, I would like to discuss what I have been reading these past few days, if only briefly, so you'll have to forgive me for making such an abrupt transition . . .
Of the four essays I read, David Attwell's "Race in Disgrace" and Michael Holland's "'Plink-Plunk': Unforgetting the Present in Coetzee's Disgrace" stand out as particularly strong readings of the novel. Attwell, as always, draws upon his enviable familiarity with Coetzee's writing to expose the rampant critical misinterpretations, misapprehensions, misrepresentations, and misunderstandings in much of the commentary inspired by Disgrace. Using the ANC's treatment of the novel in its submission to the Human Rights Commission as a starting point, Attwell identifies several instances where readers have deliberately racialized the text in order to serve their own political ends. Referring to the controversy over the novel's "socially mimetic function" as "an over-heated discussion about what is the least complex - and arguably least interesting - area of the novel's performance," Attwell addresses several of the more egregious "creative misreadings" of Disgrace before integrating the discussions arising from them into his extensive examination of the "ethical turn" David Lurie undergoes during the course of the novel (332, 333, 339).
Michael Holland's essay, taken from the same issue of interventions in which Attwell's article appears, examines how Coetzee "relegate[s] the defunct language of western masculinity to the past" in order to posit a new means of communication fit for post-apartheid South African society (395). Reading David Lurie's position in the novel as one of deeply existential isolation, Holland discusses how the pull of Lurie's nostalgia for an unattainable, romanticized past intensifies the former professor's temporal displacement and contributes to his disgrace. It is through the comedically pathetic music of his diminished operetta, ultimately, that David Lurie discovers "the absolute priority of the raw material of language" and is able to bring the "reader of the novel in direct contact with the immediate present of material existence," bringing him or her to a purer, more visceral understanding of existence as well as the means of communicating and processing that experience (404). Obviously, there is much more to the article than what I have mentioned here, but the complexity and insight of Holland's reading really cannot be summarized without necessarily diminishing one of the strongest readings of Disgrace yet published. In other words, you should read it yourself.
Despite the seemingly gratuitous exposition on the workings of literary criticism in a poststructural paradigm with which H. P. van Coller begins "A Contextual Interpretation of J.M. Coetzee's Novel Disgrace," the critic does make several important contributions to the body of Coetzee criticism. The most convincing section of the essay is van Coller's excellent discussion of Disgrace's relationship to the plaasroman, especially in regards to the transgenerational significance of the farm in the South African (especially Afrikaans) literary imagination. While the rest of the essay touches upon several interesting aspects of the novel, I find the section on the plaasroman to be on par with some of the best readings of Disgrace that I have come across and will, in all likelihood, draw upon van Coller's insights when writing the chapter on Disgrace.
The fourth and final essay I read was Benaouda Lebdai's "Bodies and Voices in Coetzee's Disgrace and Bouraoui's Garcon Manque," which focuses primarily on Lucy Lurie's role in the novel. Viewing the female body as the field upon which historical anxieties are enacted, Lebdai presents one of the more comprehensive readings of Lucy's character and, in the end, paves the way for future examinations of corporeality in the novel.
For tomorrow: More reading.
Works Cited
Attwell, David. "Race in Disgrace." interventions 4.3 (2002): 331-341.
Holland, Michael. "'Plink-Plunk': Unforgetting the Present in Coetzee's Disgrace." interventions 4.3 (2002): 395-404.
Lebdai, Benaouda. "Bodies and Voices in Coetzee's Disgrace and Bouraoui's Garcon Manque." Cross Cultures 94 (1999): 33-44.
Van Coller, H.P. "A Contextual Interpretation of J.M. Coetzee's Novel Disgrace." A Universe of (Hi)stories: Essays on J. M. Coetzee. Ed. Liliana Sikerska. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006. 15-37.
I spent a good portion of today driving around the Finger Lakes, taking in the scenery, drawing inspiration from the landscape, and otherwise enjoying the afternoon. I drove along the entire Cayuga Lake Scenic Byway, which was something I had been wanting to do for quite some time. When I got to Cayuga Lake State Park, a bit east of Seneca Falls, I decided to stop and get some reading done by the lakeside. It was a nice change of pace from the coffee shop - library - coffee shop - cafe gamut I normally run during the course of a "get out and read day."
At any rate, I would like to address the three essays (or, rather, the two essays and one review) that I read since I last posted anything about the Coetzee criticism with which I have been working, so I'll not spend any additional time rambling on about my little tour . . .
All right, getting to the criticism.
So, I finally got around to reading James Wood's review of Disgrace, which I found to be rather nasty, if occasionally insightful. If anything, the review reads like a catalog of the different backhanded compliments one might toss as Coetzee. For instance, Wood initially seems to praise the novelist because "Coetzee's vision is impressively consistent: his books eschew loosened abundance for impacted allegory," but the critic later laments that "most depressingly, people like allegory" because "people like novels that, however intelligently, tell them what to think." Coetzee, Wood continues, "is very subtle and refined, so that much of the time he does not really seem to be telling us what to think; better still, his novels self-consciously display an involvement in their own modes of presentation, so that Coetzee will often seem to be telling us what to think about being told what to think (which is still a species of being told what to think, of course)." In other words, Coetzee is didactic, but clever enough to trick us into thinking he's not really all that preachy. And this is only one of many such instances where Wood turns praise into vitriol. Elsewhere, Wood discusses a passage in Disgrace he feels "would not be out of place in a mass-market thriller. It is the sheerest conventionality . . . It is cheap writing, literally cost-saving." Furthermore, Wood argues, David Lurie "is little more than a conduit for Coetzee's taut language," essentially reducing the entire novel to an onanistic exercise in linguistic exhibitionism.
What bothers me most, in addition to the thinly-veiled disdain Wood seems to direct at Coetzee throughout the review, is the critic's entirely tangental and disarmingly acerbic attack on the Man Booker Prize, using the author of Disgrace as an excuse to air his opinions. Since the South African is, in Wood's unflattering assessment merely, "a very good writer and not a great writer, Coetzee emits prize-pheromones." All right. We get it: Wood thinks Coetzee is overrated. Fair enough. But he goes further and unaccountably attacks the critics who have considered Disgrace worthy of an award. Evidentially, such committees are drawn to the pheromones of mediocrity like tomcats to a queen in heat. Moreover, statements like "prize juries are known, more often than not, for their invincible wrong-headedness" sound exceedingly inappropriate coming from someone who, according to the Booker Prize's website, "recommended a novel by Clare Messud to his fellow judges, conveniently forgetting to mention that she was his wife" a full five years before Coetzee won his second prize.
It's a shame that Wood cannot contain his contempt because he is, in all honesty, one of the most insightful critics actively discussing literature today. It's a shame, too, because the half-formed insights into Disgrace could have been developed more fully in the space Wood devotes to his attacks on fellow critics. (Wood's reviews of Coetzee's other novels, in my opinion, are considerably more valuable contributions to the body of Coetzee criticism than the one currently under discussion.)
Still, Wood's response to Coetzee's novel does provide readers with several interesting points to consider, especially when contemplating the book's possibly allegoric nature. Interestingly, it is precisely "the limitations of allegory" Wood identifies as the "significant weakness" in Coetzee's text that David Attwell takes up in the essay I read this afternoon. Unfortunately, I will have to discuss Attwell's essay (as well as Michael Holland's fascinating essay on language in Disgrace) another day because I spent so much time writing this evening's post. I will catch up though, I promise.
For tomorrow: More reading or work on the bibliography.
Work Cited
Wood, James. "Parables and Prizes." The New Republic. 10 May 2001. Available online.
I actually got today's work done fairly quickly. You see, I had a party to attend, so I was actually motivated to plough through my reading. I read so quickly, in fact, that I considered reading more than I had planned just to feel doubly accomplished. Then I got hit with a headache, skipped both the extra reading and the party, and fell asleep. Now, even though I did make the progress I'd hoped to make today, I somehow feel less satisfied with myself. I mean, it's one of those instances where one's success is diminished by his or her sense at having failed to fulfill one's potential.
Ugh.
Regardless, I did read Peter D. McDonald's "Disgrace Effects," in which the author investigates whether or not Coetzee's novel can resist the "racialized readings" many critics have given the book (326). Along the way, McDonald reviews the varied critical responses to the novel in South Africa, paying particularly close attention to that of the ANC. If, as many critics of the novel maintain, Disgrace amounts to Coetzee's allegorical "report on white racism" in post-Apartheid South Africa, the novel is "dangerously uncertain in its implications," lending itself to troubling readings in which Coetzee himself emerges as something of racist (326). For McDonald, however, the book cannot be reduced to a mere piece of contemporary South African literature interested only in commenting upon the nation out of which it emerges and, as such, cannot be expected to comment exclusively on the socio-political situations in Coetzee's homeland. Instead, while "[t]he questions it raises about racist language, the violations of human dignity, and the ethics of redress are not universal . . . they do have a bearing on many times and places" (329). Consequently, McDonald concludes, "the novel is written in such a way as to risk putting contemporary expectations, especially with regard to trading texts called 'literary,' provocatively to the test" (330). As McDonald addresses the many criticisms hurled at Coetzee in the months following the publication of Disgrace, he does an admirable job of exposing the flaws inherent to many of the racialized readings of the novel while not becoming an apologist. Ultimately, McDonald's reading is ambiguous in its evaluation, a wholly appropriate response to Coetzee's "charged story, artful rhetoric, dense allusiveness, and studied refusal to moralize" (330). Disgrace, like any great novel, does not answer nearly as many questions as it poses and McDonald, in an exceptional example of critical restraint, refuses to offer a "definitive" reading of the novel, choosing instead to free Coetzee's book from the one-dimensional readings so many commentators have given the text and inviting future readers to consider a variety of angles when approaching Disgrace.
For tomorrow: Same stuff, different day.
Work Cited
McDonald, Peter D. "Disgrace Effects." interventions 4.3 (2002): 321-330.
For some reason, I struggled to get through my reading yesterday. I kept procrastinating and biking from one cafe to another, trying to focus. In the end, my inability to focus got the better of me and I ended up reading until three or so this morning. Today's reading, fortunately, went a bit more smoothly for me. I find that, on the days when I visit Cornell's campus, I tend to be more productive. Part of the reason for this increased diligence, I'm sure, stems from the fact that visiting the venerable old institution requires that I spend more time, energy, and money than I would otherwise do, essentially making the afternoon an outing and cultivating a certain sense of obligation in my mind. I'm also convinced that the gothic architecture and breathtaking scenery have a favorable effect on my mindset. The school I currently attend, having been built during the pragmatic years of the American twentieth century, consists almost exclusively of the featureless, squat brick buildings one associates with the utilitarian values of the Cold War. Needless to say, the bland functionality of the buildings' design does not inspire the same set of emotions as the sweeping columns and decorative friezes common among older institutions. To be honest, I like the musty old buildings, the well-worn marble floors, the exquisite latticework, and the grand, sweeping curves of Cornell's campus because they remind me of similarly "academic" features of the institutions where I did my Bachelor's and Master's degrees. And I like the oldness of the campus because, it makes it easier to envision Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Farina, Vladimir Nabokov, M. H. Abrams and several of my favorite professors working in the same spot in years past. I mean, there's a reason we humans flock to certain historical places. We go to the Pyramids or the Tower of London or Chichen Itza because we know something happened in those places and we wish to imbibe what we can of those historic events or, at the very least, draw inspiration from them.
And that's what I do when I sit among the trees overlooking Ithaca.
Now, I'm not saying that a muse will descend upon me or that some quasi-spiritual force permeates the air I breathe when at the university. No. That's a bit too quixotic for me. But I do like the scholarly feel of a tradition-rich academic milieu and I do like to be reminded of the intellectual lights that have gone before me because such things get me thinking about scholarship and put me in the mood to push through my own work.
And speaking of my own work, I'd like to briefly mention the essays I read these past two days. The first essay, co-authored by Jerzy Koch and Pawel Zajas, draws upon an immense collection of Polish and Dutch reviews of Coetzee's fiction to address instances where foreign critics have misread the author's fiction. The duo's most significant contribution to the canon of Coetzee criticism, in my estimation, is their discussion of the plaasroman and the author's critical engagement with the genre. Like Rita Barnard, Koch and Zajas make an exceedingly strong case for reading Disgrace with the conventions of the plaasroman in mind.
The essay I read this afternoon, John Douthwaite's linguistic analysis of the opening chapter of Disgrace is clearly the work of a master linguist, though much of the essay simply explains how Coetzee's writing creates the emotional response most readers have when confronting the text of the novel. Where Douthwaite really shines, however, is in his meticulous unpacking of Coetzee's prose to reveal the text's "conversational, or dialogic" nature, thereby opening Disgrace up to a host of intriguing readings rarely discussed among the novel's commentators (53).
For tomorrow: More of the same.
Works Cited
Douthwaite, John. "Coetzee's Disgrace: A Linguistic Analysis of the Opening Chapter." Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Society in a 'Post'-Colonial World. Geoffrey V Davis, Peter H. Marsden, Benedicte Ledent, and Marc Delrez, eds. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. 41-60.
Koch, Jerzy and Pawel Zajas. "'They Pass Each Other By, Too Busy to Even Wave': J.M. Coetzee and His Foreign Reviewers." A Universe of (Hi)stories: Essays on J. M. Coetzee. Ed. Liliana Sikerska. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006. 111-150.
Lately, I have been a bit down on myself for taking as long as I have to work on the dissertation. I know that some people are capable of breezing through the process, churning out passably good scholarship on their way to finishing the dissertation, their degree, and their education in what often seems like no time at all. I'm not one of those people. I am rather deliberate with my research, painstakingly ensuring that I read each and every word of criticism on Coetzee, even when it seems repetitive and more than a little pointless. Likewise, I try to do a small amount of work each day, concentrating as intensely as I can rather than cram as much work into as short a time period as possible, figuring that I will retain more information that way.
And, still, it's frustrating.
I mean, I know some people turn in work that is of poorer quality that that I am aiming to produce and I know that many of those people pass and receive their doctorates, but I cannot bring myself to accept that sort of work from myself. Instead, I keep plugging away and I keep trying not to allow the doubts creep into my consciousness and find purchase there. The truth of the matter is that no two dissertations are the same just as no two individual scholars are the same. Some subjects are easier to research than others, some people are far more prolific writers than their colleagues, and some people simply possess certain talents that their peers lack and that will give them an edge. And, of course, some people work their way through graduate school while others take loans or receive grants.
The funny thing is that all this was prompted by some fellow graduate student's inadvertent announcement to the entire list-serv that, though he is not yet an A.B.D. student, he will finish his dissertation in less than a year. I thought to myself, "shit, Erik, why can't you work that fast?" I realize that dissertation-writing is not a race, that one does best when one focuses on meeting his or her own needs rather than fulfilling the expectations of others, but, man, I wanna be done, like, six months ago.
At any rate, the three articles I've not yet discussed on the blog are sitting atop my desk and I'd like to address them briefly. Of the trio, Vilashni Cooppan's "National Literature in Transnational Times: Writing Transition in the 'New' South Africa" had the least to do with Disgrace since, as its title suggests, the article deals with a mode of writing rather than a single work. Still, in situating Coetzee's novel within a transitional mode, Cooppan raises some interesting points. Since "[a]partheid in Disgrace," Cooppan argues, "is an action not yet carried through to its conclusion," we may read the novel as a snapshot of a "moment that lives the difference between the apartheid 'then' and the postapartheid 'now' as a break, a discontinuity between states rather than an either/or choice between the preconfigurative fulfillment of an anticipated identity and the burial of an obsolete one" (363). Thus, "Disgrace ends by oscillating between times and states, death and birth, the past of the completed perfective and the unknown yet hopeful future to come," precisely the focus of so many recent critical discussions of the novel (363).
The other two essays I read -- Ariella Azoulay's "An Alien Woman/a Permitted Woman: On JM Coetzee's Disgrace" and Georgina Horrell's "JM Coetzee's Disgrace: One Settler, One Bullet and the 'New South Africa'" -- focus largely on Lucy Lurie's role in the novel. The novel, for Azoulay, poses a challenge for the reader: to find a connection between Lucy's attack and David's assault on Melanie Isaacs. Backed by psychoanalytic notions of trauma, Azoulay reads Disgrace as an exercise in "adopt[ing] a nomadic point of view . . . which is capable of looking at reality from contradictory viewpoints" in order to perceive the complex layers of pain, retribution, and healing omnipresent throughout the novel and in places like South Africa (37). Horrell's essay also deals with trauma, though she focuses on the ways in which "an inscription of [colonial] guilt is performed upon gendered flesh" (32). In other words, Horrell scrutinizes Coetzee's use of Lucy Lurie as the canvas upon which the accumulated anger underlying generations of racial tension in South Africa is violently expressed.
For tomorrow: Read another essay, work on the bibliography, or read some of Coetzee's essays or interviews.
Works Cited
Azoulay, Ariella. "An Alien Woman/a Permitted Woman: On JM Coetzee's Disgrace." scrutiny2 7.1 (2002): 33-41.
Cooppan, Vilashini. "National Literature in Transnational Times: Writing Transition in the 'New' South Africa." Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood, eds. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. 346-369.
Horrell, Georgina. "JM Coetzee's Disgrace: One Settler, One Bullet and the 'New South Africa.'" scrutiny2 7.1 (2002): 25-32.
All right. It's been nearly a fortnight since I have had the time to sit down and write about my dissertation. Between long hours spent behind the wheel, time devoted to my family and friends, excessive humidity, hard (non-academic) work, and an unfortunate lack of internet access, I have barely had the opportunity to read, let alone post any blog entries about that reading. Still, I did manage to read Youth as well as several (admittedly brief) critical essays on Coetzee.
Of the five critical readings, two were book reviews. The first, Michael Upchurch's "Facing 'Disgrace,'" is a solid, if run-of-the mill, reading of Coetzee's novel. Despite finding fault with Coetzee's depiction of females and the novel's often oblique literary allusions, Upchurch ultimately praises Coetzee for his ability to weave a multi-layered narrative out of deceptively "spare...arid" prose ("Facing"). The second review, Susan Ram's excellent "A Comprehension of Life" is one of the most thorough and insightful reviews I have come across, touching on both the novel's more commonly discussed themes as well as several of the book's less obvious concerns.
I also read Derek Attridge's introduction to Coetzee's Inner Workings. Despite reading the essay with the cynicism of someone struggling to muster the energy to keep reading the seemingly endless pile of literary criticism sitting atop his desk, Attridge's argument for the value of reading a single critic's essays makes an awful lot of sense to me. I mean, if we regard the literary critic as a thinker first and foremost, it stands to reason that a comprehensive reading of his or her criticism will often yield a worldview as complex and unified as that of a philosopher.
I also read two journal articles, which I will try to discuss tomorrow. Now, though, I think it's time for bed.
For tomorrow: Read another essay, read some of Coetzee's criticism, or work on my bibliography.
Works Cited
Attridge, Derek. "Introduction." Inner Workings. By J. M. Coetzee. New York: Penguin, 2007. ix-xiv.
Ram, Susan. "A Comprehension of Life." Frontline. 16.25 (1999). Available online.
Upchurch, Michael. "Facing 'Disgrace' -- J . M. Coetzee Creates a Flawed, Intriguing Character in Post-Apartheid South Africa." Seattle Times 7 Nov. 1999. Available online.
Of the three essays I've read since I last discussed the critical writing on Disgrace, only one really stands out as what I would consider "required reading." I should emphasize that the other two essays, both taken from boundary2's "Symposium on Disgrace," are not poorly written; they're just not likely to figure into my own work and do not add much to my understanding of the novel.
The first of the pair, Louise Bethlehem's "Pliant/Compliant; Grace/Disgrace; Pliant/Compliant," as one might infer from the title, devotes a fair amount of space to linguistic analysis while exploring the author's modes of representation. Hannan Hever's "Facing Disgrace: Coetzee and the Israeli Intellectual," the second boundary2 article I read (which was, coincidentally, translated by Bethlehem), uses Coetzee's depiction of the unanticipated cultural milieu of post-Apartheid South Africa to embark upon a discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, focusing specifically on the intellectual's role in the tumultuous region upon realizing that the "Messianic" solutions hitherto envisioned do not account for the fact that "the resolution, the 'end,' of the struggle is only a point along a continuously unfolding trajectory" (45).
The essay I most enjoyed and which genuinely contributed a good deal to my own thinking about Coetzee's novel is Susan Smit-Marais and Marita Wenzel's excellent "Subverting the Pastoral: The Transcendence of Space and Place in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Taking a cue from Rita Barnard, the authors convincingly show how Coetzee inverts the conventions of the South African plaasroman in Disgrace. With as thorough a reading as any student of Coetzee could hope for, Smit-Marais and Wenzel reveal Coetzee's intricate weaving of pastoral conventions into an extremely complex critique of colonialism and its long-reaching socio-political aftermath. While virtually every sentence of the essay rings true, I was most impressed with the authors' brief discussion of Coetzee's use of nature (traditionally a reflection of the white settler's psychological satisfaction, it usually emphasizes "pureness, growth and life") to foreground the exhausted, barren state of South African society after a "history of colonial exploitation and dispossession" (214). And this is only one of many extremely good discussions in thiss exceptional essay.
For tomorrow: read an article or a bit more of Youth.
Haver, Hannan. "Facing Disgrace: Coetzee and the Israeli Intellectual." scrutiny2 7.1 (2002): 42-46.
Smit-Marais, Susan and Marita Wenzel. "Subverting the Pastoral: The Transcendence of Space and Place in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Beyond the Threshold: Explorations of Liminality in Literature. Eds. Hein Viljoen and Chris Van Der Merwe. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 209-21.
Although I read two essays in the past two days, there isn't a whole lot for me to say. Chelva Kanaganayakam's "The Anxiety of Being Postcolonial: Ideology and The Contemporary Postcolonial Novel" only briefly addresses Disgrace in its discussion of current postcolonial literature. For Kanaganayakam, Coetzee's novel "is often misread" because it is written in "a nascent form that has not yet been adequately identified" (49). This new literary mode emerges out of the writer's desire to produce fiction "in situations that require political engagement without a clear bias" (48). Coetzee's attempt to confront this situation, Kanaganayakam asserts, results in a deceptively simple "character-driven novel that only intermittently touches upon the political scene" while "remind[ing] the reader that the concerns are larger than that of straightforward social realism" (48). This "ambivalence is a measure of the anxiety of the author and the predicament of the Afrikaaner in South Africa...the anxiety of realizing that the middle position is not tenable" (48-49).
The second brief essay that I read, Gertrude B. Makhaya's "The Trouble With JM Coetzee," is less a critical examination of Disgrace than a contrast of the tumultuous critical and political responses to the novel upon its release with the more favorable treatment of the novel in the South African press following the author's 2003 Nobel Prize. While not a lode of critical insight, Makhaya's essay does provide interested readers with an accessible survey of the oft-mentioned South African response to the publication of Coetzee's controversial novel.
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Works Cited
Kanaganayakam, Chelva. "The Anxiety of Being Postcolonial: Ideology and the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel." Miscelanea: A Journal of English and American Studies 28 (2003): 43-54.
Makhaya, Gertrude B. "The Trouble with JM Coetzee." The Oxonian Review of Books 4.2 (2005). Available online.
When I woke up this morning and reminded myself that I had planned to read another critical essay on Disgrace, I felt like a petulant child. If I were younger, I would undoubtedly have balled my hands into tiny fists, pounded my feet on the ground and, in a fit of vexation, narrowed my eyes into slits while whining I doan wanna read criticism! I've already read a few dozen articles on the novel!
Fortunately for me, a friend of mine invited me to hang out tomorrow, thereby giving me a carrot to dangle in front of my mulish self. The minute I had something to look forward to, what had so recently seemed onerous began to appear quite reasonable and I decided to make today as pleasant as I could.
So I drove to Ithaca, figuring that situating myself among the bohemian bonhomie of southern New York's most famous college town would perk me up. There are times when living among the burned-out warehouses and dilapidated buildings of a plundered industrial corridor really gets to me and I feel an intense urge to flee the area. The longer I sit looking at the peeling paint and shuttered store windows, the longer I walk through the empty downtown streets looking for the elusive tumbleweed that will let me know that I do, in fact, live in the Dust Bowl, the more frustrated I grow.
Before I moved to Quebec and New York's Southern Tier, I had believed North America was a prosperous region, one in which I was fortunate to reside. Over the past seven years, however, I have seen more poverty, ignorance, and hopelessness than I had come across in the twenty-three previous years combined. My recent trips to Georgia, Florida, South Bend, IN, and Mississippi have done little to convince me that what I see in this region is an unfortunate anomaly. America, my eyes tell me, grew up fast, filled itself with prosperity, and slowly dried up, leaving a landscape pocked by the rotten husks of a once-proud nation.
Ithaca, for better or worse, has largely resisted this decay. If anything, the city seems to preserve a local flavor that seems a bit anachronistic, but is quite pleasant. I mean, sure, the city is often criticized for its large intellectually leftist, academically elitist population, but the city's population does support its local businesses, cultivates a vivacious arts scene, and proves that a community devoted to environmentally-friendly behaviors can exist. I would rather pay a bit more for rent and a bit more for food if it meant I knew the merchants personally, if it enabled me to walk down a well-kept street lined with used book and record stores.
Of course, I don't have that much capital at the moment. But I can afford a day trip now and again, which helps keep the funk from smothering me.
While sitting in the Commons, I managed to read Melinda Harvey's "Re-Educating the Romantic: Sex and the Nature-Poet in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Despite my strong desire not to do any critical reading today, I found Harvey's essay quite worth reading. In fact, she appears to be one of a very few critics who touch on ideas I consider to be central to appreciating Disgrace.
Although "Disgrace's status as a campus novel is mootable," Harvey argues, its academic setting and "preoccupation with education" and character reformation make a discussion of David Lurie's scholarly life the logical starting point for what amounts to one of the most convincing readings of the novel that I have happened across (94). Bucking the critical tendency to focus on Lurie's fascination with Byron, Harvey views the professor's academic and emotional passion for William Wordsworth and the "willfully narcissistic" attitude of the speaker in The Prelude as keys to understanding the text (98). Like the Wordsworthian traveller who privileges imagination and de-emphasizes the empirical, David Lurie "is egotistically motivated" in his pursuit of passion (100). Thus, the female others -- Soraya, Melanie, et cetera -- amount to little more than objects used to facilitate the attainment of a highly imaginative sexual satisfaction by lending (willingly and unwillingly) their physical bodies to the machinations of Lurie's self-centered fantasies.
Harvey's most interesting observation, in my opinion, is her assessment of Lucy's role in the novel:
As David's daughter -- a filial bond that includes love but precludes sex -- Lucy is left with the task of teaching him a thing or two about the problem of the overreaching imagination when it comes to women. (104)
When Lucy refuses to speak of her rape, David cannot refrain from imagining the scenario and asking himself "does he have it in him to be the woman?" (Coetzee 160). Once Lurie begins to perceive a second, less glamorous side to an "overreaching imagination," his egocentrism begins to crack. Of course, Harvey argues, "Coetzee is too much of a realist to have this sobering self-knowledge change him beyond recognition," so Lurie's change is a small one(106). His fantasies do not abate (he even fantasizes about a menage a tois with Melanie and her sister while visiting Mr. and Mrs. Isaacs in their home in George), but he does begin reigning in his dominating and domineering imagination. In fact, for Harvey, the novel's iconic closing scene amounts to "a final rejection" of Lurie's Wordsworthian roving: by giving up a favored dog, Lurie accepts that "[t]he dog will not exist, live or die, for the sake of his needs" (106).
For tomorrow: Read a brief article or a bit of Youth.
Works Cited
Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Harvey, Melinda. "Re-Educating the Romantic: Sex and the nature-Poet in Coetzee's Disgrace." Sydney Studies in English 31 (2005): 94-108.
Despite the ninety-degree (32 Centigrade for my non-North American readers) heat and an air conditioner in need of a new filter, I managed to stay comfortable enough to get some work done, albeit sweatily. I read another bit of Boyhood, which I continue to find fascinating. I've not read many memoirs and, to be honest, some recent "masterpieces" of the form have not gripped me strongly enough for me to share the enthusiasm for the genre that has been blossoming in recent years. That said, I do believe memoirists have the potential to transform their lives into the stuff of universally relevant art and Coetzee, in my opinion, does precisely this with Boyhood.
Other than reading the memoir, I have been taking it a bit easier than I have for some time, largely because the amount of academic writing I read in June began taking a toll on my ability to concentrate. Having grown accustomed to reading such material, however, I continue to feel a tiny twinge of obligation to pick up an article each day, especially because there are still so many essays to read and only a finite number of summer afternoons and evenings left in which to splay myself out on the futon or sit leisurely at a cafe, highlighter in hand. But we'll get through it all eventually (why I resort to a rhetorical strategy like the royal we is beyond me).
At any rate, I did want to briefly mention the two essays I read last week but had not gotten around to discussing. Rosemarie Buikema's "Literature and the Production of Ambiguous Memory: Confession and Double Thoughts in Coetzee's Disgrace" falls into what I have begun referring to as the Truth and Reconciliation school of Disgrace criticism. Broadly speaking, there are roughly three major clusters of scholarly discussion surrounding the novel. Naturally, a good deal of the criticism on the novel falls outside the umbrage cast by these umbrella categories but I would venture to say at least half of the commentary on Disgrace could be classified as one of the following three types:
1.Truth and Reconciliation: criticism in this category tends to focus on Coetzee's treatment of the reconciliation process in post-Apartheid South Africa. It deals extensively with race relations and often views David Lurie's disciplinary hearing as either a metaphor for the TRC itself or as an expression and exploration of the dynamics underlying such attempts at reconciling historically antagonistic parties. Lucy Lurie's attitudes towards Peturus, Pollux, and the two unnamed assailants and David's encounter with Mr. Isaacs in George also figure prominently in such criticism.
2.Animals and human-animal relations: this school of criticism tends to focus on Lurie's relationship with dogs. Anthropomorphism and de-humanization are often major threads in this type of essay. The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello, understandably, provide a wealth of intertextual insights and critics often discuss Coetzee's use of the figure of the absolute other as evidence of the novel's continuation of the author's career-long concern with issues relating to alterity and representation.
3.Socio-political criticism: often sharing a concern for issues of interest to Truth and Reconciliation critics, socio-political criticism also focuses on representations of post-Apartheid violence, racism, sexism, and related tensions not exclusively the focus of the TRC. Lucy's rape, Lurie's assault on Melanie, and Petrus's relationship to the Luries tend to be central concerns for such critics. Much of the criticism in this vein, though certainly not all, views Disgrace in a negative manner, as a hopelessly bleak portrayal of the still-nascent Rainbow Nation.
Obviously, most articles extend beyond the concerns of a given category, quite a few could fall into at least two of them, and many do not fit into any at all. But I do find it helpful to arrange my mental notes in this way.
At any rate, Buikema's essay fits into the first category and save for a few factual errors (Lurie's assailants do not "pour gasoline on Lurie," as she claims, for instance; the men actually pour mentholated spirits on him), it provides a strong reading of the novel as deceptively and problematically allegorical (192). Readers interested in examining the ways in which literature can help shape and question the production of memory (especially that which has been shaped by officially-sanctioned organizations) will find it indispensable.
Elleke Boehmer's "Sorry, Sorrier, Sorriest: The Gendering of Contrition in J . M. Coetzee's Disgrace," like many articles, interprets the novel's depiction of violence in South Africa as a bleak portrait of a society in which enduring the manifestation of historically-repressed animosity is the only option for those people unfortunate enough to live during an era "where the present is more often than not a rehearsal and prolongation of the past" (136). Where Boehmer differs from critics similarly convinced of the novel's "grin and bear it" attitude is in her frustration with Coetzee's depiction of female acquiescence. Understandably, Boehmer finds Lucy's attitude towards her rape problematic. After all, Boehmer asks, "[i]s reconciliation with a history of violence possible if the woman . . . is, as ever, barefoot and pregnant, and biting her lip?" (146).
For tomorrow: Read some more of Boyhood.
Works Cited
Boehmer, Elleke. "Sorry, Sorrier, Sorriest: The Gendering of Contrition in J . M. Coetzee's Disgrace." J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 2006. 135-147.
Buikema, Rosemarie. "Literature and the Production of Ambiguous Memory: Confession and Double Thoughts in Coetzee's Disgrace." European Journal of English Studies 10.2 (2006): 187-197.
Rita Barnard, in my opinion, is one of the most consistently excellent Coetzee scholars around. Although "Coetzee's Country Ways" does not appear to figure into my discussion of Disgrace, I would like to at least mention the essay because I appreciate the depth of thought and clarity of language in Barnard's article. Part adroit linguistic analysis, part intertextual exploration, "Coetzee's Country Ways" examines the novel's contribution to and commentary on the South African pastoral tradition. Contrasting Disgrace with Life & Times of Michael K and Charles van Onselen's The Seed is Mine, Barnard makes a convincing case for reading Coetzee's novel as the author's "anti-pastoral . . . contribution to a larger discursive and narrative project of re-imaging rural life in South Africa" in the still-nascent post-Apartheid era (393).
For tomorrow: Largely because I really need a break from reading nothing but literary criticism, I will give myself the option of starting Boyhood if I do not feel like reading another essay tomorrow.
Work Cited
Barnard, Rita. "Coetzee's Country Ways." interventions 4.3 (2002): 384-394.
The article I read today, Mike Marais's "The Possibility of Ethical Action: JM Coetzee's Disgrace," only superficially addresses the Booker Prize-winning novel. Despite its title and Marais's lament that "[w]hile the novel has been widely discussed, nothing much has been said about it," the essay is more of a theoretical treatise on the other than an analysis of Coetzee's novel. Still, since Marais is an important Coetzee scholar and the author of many texts central to the critical discussion surrounding his fiction, researchers may find this brief essay to be a useful supplementary reading when approaching the ever-expanding body of Coetzee criticism.
For tomorrow: read another essay.
Work Cited
Marais, Mike. "The Possibility of Ethical Action: J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." scrutiny2 5.1 (2000): 57-63.
One of the more rewarding aspects of this dissertation, for me, has been learning a decent amount about South Africa and that nation's social and political history. As I have mentioned before, I had not initially planned on writing a dissertation specifically on J. M. Coetzee. In fact, I had assumed he would not be the subject of much more than a fifth of the project. Not surprisingly, then, my interest in the author had little do do with his status as a South African writer. As the focus of my dissertation has narrowed into a single author study, however, I have had to read quite a bit of material related to a place and an epoch to which I hadn't paid as much attention as I have to those a bit closer to home. And this has been surprisingly fulfilling. I have always had a predilection for Scandinavian history and culture and have more than a passing interest in the sociological aspects of circumpolar studies, so shifting my attention to a country like South Africa has certainly been a wholly new as well as enlightening and enriching experience.
Of course, as a literature graduate student, I have spent a significant amount of time reading postcolonial literature and theory and I have even pursued those studies beyond the confines of the classroom in my own leisure reading, so I am well acquainted with much of the critical and philosophical language one finds in the criticism surrounding J. M. Coetzee's fiction. Words like alterity, the other, and liminality (and the concepts they signify) have long been part of my academic vocabulary, but this project has given my understanding a much more nuanced texture, which I appreciate.
Of the central concerns of postcolonial studies, not surprisingly, is the concept of the border, the subject of the essay I read yesterday afternoon. As Grant Farred asserts, "the border [is] the meeting of difference," the site of hybridity and conflict, a physical or metaphysical plain in which the familiar mingles with the foreign (16). Farred, like several other commentators, views Disgrace as a novel problematically situated "on the historical frontier" of the Eastern Cape, the "site where race, racism and race relations are most deeply embedded, most resistant to being reconstructed" (17). The "psycholandscape" that comes into being in such a historically-contested region (the indigenous population, Afrikaner Trekkers, and British colonists have a long history of bloody conflict in the area) is one in which "change - the dominant rhetoric in post-apartheid South Africa - comes last, not first" (17). It is here that David Lurie, arguably an embodiment of pre-apartheid white privilege, comes into direct conflict with the cultural and social reconfigurations of the "new South Africa," as embodied by the increasingly powerful figure of Petrus. Of course, Lucy, David's daughter, also figures prominently in Farred's essay. Consistent with the negative (which should not be confused with "poor") reading of the novel that he articulates elsewhere, Farred argues that "Disgrace transforms the frontier into a site that is even more disturbing because it functions not through confrontation but complicity . . . the novel leaves the women with no option but to exchange the violation of their bodies for a minimal safety," a particularly dismal version of "post-apartheid white acquiescence" (18):
At the borderlines, at the fringes of the new society, subjects rely not on new inscriptions for and of the land, but on older forms of exchange: the tacit compact: violence is endured, vague safety is expected. Life at the border works not because of the regognition that the language of both liberation and reconciliation has failed. Historical changes can be absorbed and transformed into new racial codes, new forms of enfranchisements, reinstating older forms of violence. (19)
Though his reading is decidedly bleaker than most, Farred's analysis of Disgrace is consistently intelligent and thought-provoking and, for readers interested in understanding why so many South Africans found Coetzee's version of the Rainbow Nation so difficult to swallow, an extremely useful resource.
I also read an interesting review of Andre Brink's The Rights of Desire in the Norwegian journal Vinduet. I don't know if Norwegian literary criticism is inherently clearer than its anglophone counterpart, but despite it being written in my second language, Kristen Skare Orgeret's essay is an extremely lucid example of literary criticism. Although Orgeret focuses on Brink's novel, she devotes a significant amount of attention to Coetzee's novel (from which Brink draws the title for his book). Although her reading of Disgrace is not quite as bleak as Farred's, Orgeret does view the novel as an extremely dark portrait of contemporary South African society. She does, however, conclude that "[s]elv om baade Vanaere og Attraaens rett er moerke, brutale og paa mange maaater pessimiske fremstillinger av regnbuenatsjonen som gikk tapt, handler de ogsaa om haap og om muligheten ti aa leve ansvarlig med andre," echoing the sentiments of many anglophone critics. Of her many insightful comments on both novelists, readers interested in a comparative reading of the two books may find Orgeret's assertion that while Brink's Ruben Olivier represents the Afrikaner's position in the new South Africa, David Lurie embodies the British-descended part of South African society to be most valuable. There is, however, much more to be found in the essay (for those readers who can read Norwegian, at least).
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Work Cited
Farred, Grant. "Back to the Borderlines: Thinking Race Disgracefully." scrutiny2 7.1 (2002): 16-19.
Orgeret, Kristin Skare. "Der Smaafugl skjelver." Vinduet 18 March 2002. Available online.
One of the more difficult aspects of the dissertation-writing process, for me, has been ensuring that I have read virtually everything on Coetzee. Every time I finish photocopying and ordering articles, it seems, I come across a reference to another, even-harder-to-find essay that I must then attempt to locate. More often than not, the source of the article I cannot find is a South African publication ('cuz, you know, I'm writing about one of that nation's most famous authors), which makes it considerably more difficult to obtain in the States than, say, a Canadian magazine. If anything, the process has taught me that supporting freely-assessable web-based e-journals should figure high on the list of the Academy's priorities. There's so much information out there and we have the means to distribute it efficiently and cost-effectively. . .let's do it!
Anyway, I read Carrol Clarkson's "'Done because we are too menny': Ethics and Identity in J M Coetzee's Disgrace" this evening. Focusing largely on the ethical implications of Darwinian theory, Clarkson uses Coetzee's allusions to Hardy's Jude the Obscure to enter into a discussion of human ephemerality in Disgrace. Ultimately, Clarkson argues, Coetzee presents his reader with a document that emphasizes "the transtemporality of the individual life as a carrier of something larger than" one's own existence (87). Also, in a completely unrelated note, Clarkson pens what may be the single greatest bit of prose I have ever seen in a piece of literary criticism, especially when taken out of context:
Humankind shares 40% of its genes with the banana. This may surprise you, but I would hazard a guess that the staggering ontological fact in itself does little to appease your general sense of miserable alienation, let alone your more profound European Angst... (84)
Overall, Clarkson's essay is a solid study of the role of animals in Coetzee's novel as agents of humility, their very existence forcing humanity to reconsider its assumptions about the value of individual existence.
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Work Cited
Clarkson, Carrol. "'Done because we are too menny': Ethics and Identity in J M Coetzee's Disgrace" Current Writing 15.2 (2003): 77-90.
I've given myself a bit of a break these past two days. I have continued reading essays on Disgrace as I had planned, but the two most recent articles have been book reviews. I did, however, get quite a bit of time-consuming e-library work done this afternoon, so I may be misrepresenting how much effort I have put into things a bit.
At any rate, the one full-length article I read (on Tuesday) was Kai Easton's "J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace: Reading Race/Reading Scandel," an extremely interesting look at the ways in which the South African public received Coetzee's novel upon its publication in 1999. As part of a collection of essays dealing with "scandalous fictions," Easton's study discusses how Disgrace offended a great many South Africans with its bleak depiction of black-on-white violence in the immediate aftermath of Apartheid. Considering the responses of Coetzee's colleagues in academia and among the South African literati in addition to the ANC's use of the novel to demonstrate lingering racial tensions in the country, Easton provides an intelligent survey of the most negative emotional and political interpretations of the book. Interestingly, Easton suggests that Coetzee may have deliberately crafted his novel in such a way as to encourage and even solicit such harsh criticism in an effort to ask readers "Can we read beyond race?" (200).
Of the two review essays I read, I enjoyed Andrew O'Hehir's article for Salon the most. Although it does not make any startlingly novel observations, O'Hehir's review covers virtually all of the themes that would come to dominate the critical discussion of the novel in the decade following its publication. In fact, it may well serve as an ideal introduction to a collection of criticism centered around the novel. The second review I read, Adam Mars-Jones's "Lesbians are like that because they're fat" also makes some very good observations, though the title is misleadingly salacious and draws the reader's attention away from an article that has next-to-nothing to do with lesbian women. Mars-Jones's most important contribution to the larger critical discussion of Disgrace, in my opinion, is his reading of the novel as:
simultaneously a story of redemption and of collapse, just as a famous optical illusion is simultaneously a duck and a rabbit, but can only be seen at any one moment as one or the other. The reading mind responds to the possibilities in disconcerting alternation.
In other words, Mars-Jones suggests that Disgrace tells two stories "built from the same set of materials" -- namely, David Lurie's evolution from the selfish, proud, anachronistic Romantic he is at the novel's outset to the humble manual laborer content to tend to dying dogs at the book's conclusion and a disparaging portrait of racial relations in the 'new South Africa" -- that one must focus on individually in order to fully appreciate.
For tomorrow: Read another article.
Works Cited
Easton, Kai. "J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace: Reading Race/Reading Scandal." Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere. Eds. Jago Morrison and Susan Watkins. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan (2006): 187-205.
Mars-Jones, Adam. "Lesbians Are Like That Because They're Fat." The Observer 18 July 1999. 26 June 2008.
O'Hehir, Andrew. Rev. of Disgrace, by J . M. Coetzee. Salon.com. 5 Nov. 1999. 6 June 2008.
When I first decided to write an essay on Disgrace several years ago, I found that the bulk of the published criticism focusing on the novel (at least those articles I encountered) dealt in some way with Coetzee's conception(s) of (dis)grace. Now, I find, much of the critical discussion tends to take up one of two principal concerns, either the novel's reflection upon the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or Coetzee's treatment of animals -- especially in light of the assertions presented in the Tanner Lectures delivered by the author at Princeton University and subsequently published as The Lives of Animals and the eponymous chapters of Elizabeth Costello. Onno Oerlemans's "A Defense of Anthropomorphism: Comparing Coetzee and Gowdy" is a particularly strong example of the latter strain of critical concern. In it, Oerlemans examines Coetzee's careful treatment of the alterity of non-human presences in Disgrace, focusing, as many of his fellow commentators have done, on the oft-cited concluding scene of the novel in which David Lurie consigns Driepoot, the crippled dog with whom he has forged a tenuous bond, to Bev Shaw's needle. The ambiguous ending of the novel, Oerlemans concludes, while apparently "calculated to shock readers out of a sense that Lurie might finally" achieve some semblance of the elusive and ill-defined "grace" he has somehow lost, "it is thematically consonant with the rest of the novel's depiction of animals" (188). "The shock of emotion" the concluding scene elicits from the reader, Oerlemans continues, "forces us to acknowledge the reality of animal being," indicating that "Lurie's moral progress in the novel is not marked by his failed chance to save the animal" but by his newfound ability to focus his love on the doomed canine as it dies (188-189).
Still, Oerelmans maintains, Coetzee refuses to fully anthropomorphize the dogs, emphasizing the ultimate alterity of the animal-as-other as well as highlighting the undeniable physical presence of non-human existence. Animals, then, remind readers "of the problem of representation itself," a theme of central importance to Coetzee's entire ouevre (189). Thus, like many behaviorist ethologists, Coetzee strives to represent "the unbridgeable nature of the divide between human and non-human sentience," refusing to appropriate the subjectivity of the non-human other by endowing animals with human characteristics (185). In the end, we may glimpse some of the animality within ourselves and we may sense a very real individuality in the non-human other, but these realizations remain, necessarily, vague, enigmatic, and inscrutable. In other words, it's a delightfully existential understanding that we can never fully know an/other and that we can never properly depict the other's complete reality.
For tomorrow: Read another article and/or do some library work.
Work Cited
Oerlemans, Onno. "A Defense of Anthropomorphism: Comparing Coetzee and Gowdy." Mosaic 40.1 (2007): 181-196.
About half an hour ago, a friend of mine lamented that she has been suffering from a bout of writer's block and -- BAM! -- it hit me. I have been suffering from reader's block. That's why it has been taking me so long to get through some of the criticism I have been reading. Once the flashbulb went off in my mind (I should emphasize that the flashbulb in question is metaphorical; I am not, as far as I can tell, some sort of Philip K. Dick/Ridley Scott replicant), I felt a tiny bit better. Once in a while, I find, it's nice to label something, compartmentalize it, and make it manageable. So there, reader's block! I stick my tongue at thee!
Anyway, once I stomped the reader's block into submission, I finished reading the introductory essay Derek Attridge penned for the special issue of interventions devoted to Disgrace. As always, Attridge synthesizes an extremely large amount of material (in this case, the rapidly-expanding critical discussion of Coetzee's 1999 novel) into an extremely readable and thoughtful essay. For anyone interested in a quick introduction to the various strains of scholarly debate surrounding Disgrace, Attridge's essay is a wonderful place to start. One of the more pleasing aspects of Attridge's essay, too, is his staunch support for reading Coetzee's novel as literature rather than "historical reportage, political prescription, or allegorical scheme," defending literature as "a challenge to other discourses, including the discourse of politics, which so often attempts to close it down" and as a text that "disturbs. . .any simple faith in the political efficacy of literature - a faith upon which some styles of postcolonial criticism are built" (319-320).
I read Rebecca Saunders's "Disgrace in the Time of a Truth Commission" this evening. Although I have come across scads of essays connecting Disgrace to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Saunders's is among the best that I have seen. She makes a thoroughly convincing case for reading Coetzee's novel as "structured around a series of disturbing interrogations" that essentially interrogate interrogation:
These scenes of interrogation, I wish to argue, not only interrogate each other, but engage a number of urgent ethical problems opened up by teh TRC, at the core of which lie a series of significant tensions between the 'visceral' and 'reason'. Both Disgrace and the TRC question, that is, whether the visceral (conceived as the emotional, instinctive and deeply embodied) can be reasonable, or is in necessaryopposition to reason; or whether reason, and the justice and truth that derive from it, are by nature eviscerated, whether they inevitably translate the visceral into abstract value, disembodied meaning or immaterial recovery. (99)
For instance, drawing upon Nietzsche's observations on the almost economic nature of justice, Saunders argues that "Lurie's position [during his disciplinary hearing] insists that justice is a matter of calculable adequation, of indemnity and exchange" (100). Of course, Farodia Rassool and the committee members are not satisfied with David's admission of guilt; they want to see that he is sorry. This is where Saunders's essay gets really interesting. She locates the schism between the reasonable functionality of an organized judiciary body (like the university committee or the TRC) and the visceral, emotive, and even irrational needs and desires of the people involved within such a body. The essay, like Coetzee's novel, raises more questions than it answers: what role, if any, must outward performance play in reconciliation?; if one admits to guilt, must he or she also be genuinely sorry for the wrongdoing or is it sufficient to "pay" a judicial penalty?; how can the law measure something like sincerity?; is it reasonable to expect a guilty party to transform into a different type of person as part of reconciliation?; will the victim of wrongdoing accept any punishment?; is reconciliation even possible? And on and on. Ultimately, Saunders concludes, Disgrace "leaves us with a messy nettle-strewn bed on which the social conscience is destined to find little rest" (105). And this, I imagine, is Coetzee's point: there are no easy answers; we should toss and turn on questions like these.
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Work Cited
Saunders, Rebecca. "Disgrace in the Time of a Truth Commission." Parallax 11.3 (2005): 99-106.
I struggled to get any reading done today. I mean, I really struggled. Anything and everything seemed more interesting to me and, no matter what I did or where I went, I could not get myself to focus. This may, of course, be the result of knowing that I have to get through literally thousands of pages of criticism on Disgrace -- a daunting task, to say the least. Whatever the reason, though, I had the attention span of a gnat for much of the day and, eventually, after I abandoned two longer essays, I managed to read Anne Longmuir's extremely brief "Coetzee's Disgrace." Basically, Longmuir reviews the negative criticism of Disgrace and, using the text-based analysis that is the staple of The Explicator, refutes some of the harsher assessments of the novel by suggesting "Coetzee carefully undercuts and undermines" the possibly racist nature of David Lurie's narrative (119).
In addition to Longmuir's discussion of Disgrace, I read several other essays over the past few days. Ute Kauer's "Nation and Gender: Female Identity in Contemporary South African Writing" touches upon Disgrace in a larger discussion of South African fiction. Although Kauer's reading of Disgrace is relatively brief, she makes several interesting observations about Lucy Lurie's pragmatic approach to life in the aftermath of the rape at the center of the novel. Colleen M. Sheils's "Opera, Byron, and a South African Psyche in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace" is one of the more overtly psychoanalytic readings of the novel. Heavily indebted to Jacqueline Rose's States of Fantasy, Sheils's essay offers an interpretation of Disgrace in which the opera David Lurie attempts to write towards the end of the book reveals the former academic's tumultuous unconscious. Among other things, in her troubling (though plausible) reading of the composition, Sheils suggests that Lurie experiences a nostalgia for the benefits of Apartheid, a longing which manifests itself in the ex-professor's inability to resurrect Lord Byron through music. In the end, Lurie "chooses to be disengaged from the difficulties of life" and "condemns Byron to hell" (49). The opera's failure is also Lurie's failure; he simply will not adjust to the often difficult racial milieu of post-Apartheid society.
Additionally, I read a pair of essays from the special issue of interventions devoted to Coetzee: Mark Sanders's "Disgrace" and Graham Pechey's "Coetzee's Purgatorial Africa." Sanders's essay is an interesting linguistic study of Coetzee's novel. Comparing Coetzee's critique of university "rationalization" and the syntactical quirks of David Lurie and Petrus with Njabulo Ndebele's socio-linguistic theories about the role of English as a tool of colonialism in Africa, Sanders suggests that Coetzee presents an unfinished linguistic state, capturing a moment of African history in which the English language is in a heightened state of flux, bridging the gap between a colonial then and the post-Apartheid future with a linguistically slippery now.
Pechey's essay disappointed me somewhat. Having praised his "eminently readable prose" in a previous entry, I was a bit surprised by the long-windedness of this essay. Sharing some of Sanders's linguistic concern (but discussing several other issues as well), Pechey also focuses on an Africa in flux, a society that is no longer mired in the Hell of Apartheid but not yet the paradise of a racially-integrated and peaceful post-Apartheid state.
I regret not having the time to discuss the essays any further since there is much more to each reading that the tiny bit that I have discussed here, but it is quite late and I must be getting to bed.
For tomorrow: Read another essay
Works Cited
Kauer, Ute. "Nation and Gender: Female Identity in Contemporary South African Writing." Current Writing 15.2 (2003): 106-116.
Longmuir, Anne. "Coetzee's Disgrace." The Explicator 65 (2007): 119-121.
Pechey, Graham. "Coetzee's Purgatorial Africa: The Case of Disgrace." interventions 4.3 (2002): 374-383.
I'm still wrestling with my completely out-of-whack sleep schedule and, as a result, I tend to finish my reading much later than I would like. Still, I suppose, I have been getting things done. I just have this nagging feeling that I would get more done if I could return to a schedule a bit more in sync with the rest of the world. I mean, I have never been comfortable with getting myself out of bed earlier than, say, ten in the morning but this sleep-by-day, work-by-night thing doesn't work too well when you live in an area where you are essentially the only person on that schedule. In other words, I want to work when other people are also working. Otherwise, I'll keep feeling thoroughly disconnected from the world, a feeling that tends to have an adverse effect on my productivity.
Part of my difficulty, too, stems from the critical reading that I have been doing and will continue working on for the foreseeable future. Were an individual merely preparing to teach a course on a topic, he or she might read some of the "canonized" criticism surrounding a given work and then move on to the next text on which he or she intended to focus, bypassing many of the hard-to-locate articles from obscure international journals. (Although, ideally, one would like to have as complete a knowledge of his or her subject as possible and might, time permitting, seek out the truly rare texts). With a dissertation (or any other book-length project), however, one has the obligation to perform an exhaustive amount of research, culminating in an elite state of expertise. Now, the end result is delightful, I'm sure, but the road to getting there is another story entirely. When working on an author as prominent as J. M. Coetzee, tackling the sheer amount of critical writing can be a quite daunting -- and, after a while, rather monotonous -- task. My problem, then, is pushing my way through the many articles that repeat the same information that I have already read several times over. Of course, many of the articles are, in themselves, wholly original readings of the text but, having read scads of other essays, I find that much of the information in one paper can be found piecemeal in a selection of other essays. Thus, once one has plowed through a few dozen essays, say, any new essay is not likely to shed much light on the text. Unless, of course, it is the rare article that either identifies an important narrative thread that had hitherto been passed over or the annoyingly left-field essay that advances untenably absurd theories about the text. Basically, if my reading does not engage my attention with new or interesting insights, I have a harder time focusing, which often results in my spending much longer on an article than I would like. So, the longer it takes to read, the more likely I will be up late and, consequently, the later I will sleep in the next day. Repeat.
As for my reading today, Grant Farred's "The Mundanacity of Violence: Living in a State of Disgrace," I really haven't much to say. The essay is another of the more negative readings of Disgrace, highlighting what the author terms the "mundanacity" of horrific violence in post-Apartheid South Africa. Basically, Farred shares a convincing, if pedestrian, impression of Coetzee's novel as depicting a state of existence in which indifference and acquiescence have become epidemic and people no longer bat a proverbial eyelid at the most disturbing instances of crime. In other words, rape, murder, and robbery have become so ubiquitous in the South Africa that Coetzee depicts that they recede into the background with the equally unnoticeable chirruping of birds and rustling of leaves.
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Work Cited
Farred, Grant. "The Mundanacity of Violence: Living in a State of Disgrace." interventions 4.3 (2002): 352-362.
I passed the afternoon at Cornell, photocopying some of the journal articles I was unable to locate at my university's library. As always, I spent a good deal more time and money obtaining fewer materials than I would have liked, but it was a productive day nonetheless. Besides, it's always pleasant to be in a college town.
In addition to the gruntwork that is article-hunting, I read Jacques Van Der Elst's "Guilt, Reconciliation and Redemption: Disgrace and its South African Context," a rather unexceptional lecture on Coetzee's novel. Largely devoid of analysis, Van Der Elst's paper makes brief mention of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, summarizes the novel's plot, and rehashes the familiar accusations of authorial nihilism. Although I don't think the lecture will shed much light on the novel for people researching Coetzee, it may be of interest to readers unfamiliar with the more negative interpretations of the book.
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Work Cited
Van Der Elst, Jacques. "Guilt, Reconciliation and Redemption: Disgrace and its South African Context." A Universe of (Hi)stories: Essays on J. M. Coetzee. Ed. Liliana Sikerska. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006. 39-44.
Again, since it's quite a bit later than I had hoped it would be when I finished my reading for the day, I will have to keep this entry on the briefer side of things.
When I began seriously working on the dissertation in December, I made it a point to look back at my years in college and graduate school, analyzing what has and has not worked for me in terms of academic success and personal satisfaction. As an undergraduate, I learned that one ultimately has the choice of whether or not to succeed. For someone like myself, this meant restricting my extracurricular activities to my weekly two-hour punk rock radio show and postponing socializing until I had finished whatever homework I had to do. Often, I would be in the library for ten hours a day. When I did hang out with my friends, though, I had the benefit of knowing that I had not left anything undone, so I enjoyed myself more than I would otherwise have done.
I have since revised this approach, partly because I have come to realize that some semblance of a social life really improves one's mood and often makes working considerably easier to get through. Now I try to prioritize my friends and family whenever possible, which occasionally disrupts my study patterns. After all, their lives do not revolve around the same academic calendar as mine does. Likewise, my friends no longer live in the same building or dine at the same eateries as I do. So, when the opportunity to socialize comes up, I put down my books and head out to wherever it is that my friends and I have decided to spend time. The problem, of course, is that I have to ensure that I do not neglect my work, either. In other words, I have my cake and I want to make sure that I also eat it. Thus, I must work before and/or after having fun.
Today was one of those days. I was to spend some time with friends, but had not finished reading the article that I'd set aside for the day. So, I had to stay up late reading.
Fortunately, I only had to reread Derek Attridge's "Age of Bronze, State of Grace: Music and Dogs in Coetzee's Disgrace" today. I say that I am fortunate not only because I have already read the essay but because Attridge is one of the absolute best Coetzee critics out there. His articles are always comprehensive, extremely readable, and often, among the handful of "definitive" studies of the work in question. This essay focuses primarily on David Lurie's time in and around his daughter's smallholding outside of Grahamstown, attempting to identify and locate what might be considered the former professor's attainment of grace. Recalling his earlier essay on The Master of Petersburg, in which the Derridean concept of the arrivant plays a central role, Attridge suggests that grace "is the arrival of the unexpected in unexpectedly beneficent form" (112). Like many of his fellow commentators, Attridge devotes significant attention to Lurie's work with the doomed canines at Bev Shaw's veterinary clinic. It is here, among the unwanted dogs of the Eastern Cape, Attridge suggests, that Lurie's grace descends upon him. As the former professor composes his quirky chamber opera about Lord Byron and cares for the dogs about to be euthanized, Lurie senses a change in himself that, for lack of a better word, may well be described as "grace."
There is, of course, a great deal more in the essay, but I will call it a night and stop here.
For tomorrow: Either do library work, bibliographical work, or read an essay or review on Disgrace.
Attridge, Derek. "Age of Bronze, State of Grace: Music and Dogs in Coetzee's Disgrace." Novel 34.1 (2000): 98-121. Also available online.
I'm going to keep this entry extremely brief. I did get some reading done today: Tom Herron's "The Dog Man: Becoming Animal in Coetzee's Disgrace." Although Herron covers a subject (the Deleuzean/Guattarian concept of "becoming animal") many of his fellow scholars have already discussed at length, his essay is easily the best, most comprehensive study of the topic that I have encountered. Herron deftly synthesizes difficult theoretical material and weaves it seamlessly into his reading of Disgrace to produce an extremely clear, utterly convincing interpretation of the novel that is both appreciative and, when merited, critical of Coetzee's treatment of animals and animality. Any student of Coetzee would do well to read this essay early on in his or her investigations into the criticism surrounding Disgrace. Seriously, this might be the first essay I've on read on Disgrace to which I would give an unreserved "A."
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Work Cited
Herron, Tom. "The Dog Man: Becoming Animal in Coetzee's Disgrace." Twentieth Century Literature 51. 4 (2005): 467-90. Available online.
Today was a relatively light day for me. I reread Geoffrey Baker's "The Limits of Sympathy," focusing on the author's reading of Disgrace. Though my initial response to the essay was that it is "a rather pedestrian consideration of sympathy," I did find myself less critical the second time around. While I do not think the essay's perspective is particularly unique, I do feel that it handles its subject matter more effectively (read: more clearly) than many papers expressing similar concerns.
I suspect that at least some of this revised response stems from the increased familiarity I now have with Coetzee's fiction and the critical discussions surrounding his work. Furthermore, when I read the essay the first time around, my focus was on Age of Iron. I had, after all, been under the impression that I had already sufficiently covered Disgrace and would merely be expanding an earlier essay on the novel into a chapter on several Coetzee books. In other words, I may not have paid as close attention to the section I reviewed today. So, the reading may not be unique, but I do admire Baker's contribution to the discussion of what Elizabeth Costello has famously termed the "sympathetic imagination." I found Baker's etymological explanation of Coetzee's linguistic play especially valid and I suspect many students of Coetzee will benefit from the critic's insights. For instance, when discussing David Lurie's assessment of Soraya as "[a] ready learner, compliant, pliant," Baker emphasizes the "tidy trick of language" Coetzee uses to highlight "the lack of sympathy in Lurie's associations with Soraya":
the prefix com is sharply dropped, as if the sym in sympathy, and with it any real togetherness or interpersonal connection, were disappearing before the reader's eyes (41).
Again, while such insights are hardly earth-shattering in their originality, they are precisely the sort of observations one would want to share with readers unfamiliar with the complex layers of Coetzee's language, especially undergraduates approaching the author's work for the first time.
For tomorrow: Read another essay or work on the bibliography.
Works Cited
Baker, Geoffrey. "The Limits of Sympathy: J. M. Coetzee's Evolving Ethics of Engagement." ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 36.1-2 (2005): 27-49.
I got through another two essays today, which was a nice bit of progress. I'm still inching along at the proverbial snail's pace, but my "read" stack is beginning to hold its own when lined up next to the "unread" pile (I should emphasize that this is a figurative statement; I have not been spending time carefully piling photocopied journal articles).
The first essay I read, Gillian Gane's "Unspeakable Injuries in Disgrace and David's Story" addresses troubling representations of women in both Coetzee's and Wicomb's novels. Gane's reading of Lucy's rape and its aftermath in Disgrace, a topic to which she devotes significant attention, is among the more convincing interpretations of the scene I have seen. I also find her reading of the novel as "dis-raced" particularly interesting. Though I do not wholly agree with her, Gane's essay strikes me as an exceedingly solid example of an important, Lucy-centric strain in the novel's criticism.
The second essay I read (or, rather, re-read) was Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay "Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching." Spivak's paper is, as one familiar with the author might expect, rather heavily theory-laden. I mean Levinas enters in the second sentence of the paper, Derrida in the third, and Kant in the fourth. But this is to be expected. Spivak is, after all, one of the academic superstars for whom abstruse poststructural rhetoric has produced many a bulging paycheck. That said, Spivak's paper is considerably more readable than much of her writing, though her language does occasionally resemble that of a child presenting a book report (introducing a quote with "These are some of the daughter Lucy's last words in the novel" reminds me of statements like "This is the sound a puppy makes" [20]). Still, she does make a few interesting observations, including reading Lucy's response to her attack as "a refusal to be raped" (21). All-in-all, this essay will likely serve those Coetzee scholars interested in aphasia and other linguistic considerations rather well. The highlight, though, is Spivak's one-sentence summarization of "Can the Subaltern Speak," suggesting that the oft-maligned essay could in fact, as many frustrated academics have claimed, be summed up in one brief sentence.
For tomorrow: Another essay.
Works Cited
Gane, Gillian. "Unspeakable Injuries in Disgrace and David's Story" Kunapipi 24.1-2 (2002): 101-113.
Spivak. Gayatri Chakravorty. "Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching." Diacritics 32.3-4 (2002): 17-31.
I just finished reading Rita Barnard's excellent essay, "J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and the South African Pastoral." Written in the sort of clear-yet-erudite prose one does not encounter nearly as often as one would like, Barnard's paper examines the ways in which Coetzee's language conveys alienation and the impossibility of cultural translation in the "new South Africa," while thoughtfully touching upon the book's play on the plaasroman form and the troubling presence of potentially racist content. In stark contrast to Florance Strattion's extremely negative reading of David Lurie's racist comments, however, Barnard views the former professor's "cartoonish colonial stereotypes" and his "ridiculous, hopelessly dated vocabulary" as signs not of intolerance but of a failure to effectively translate the traumatic experience of the attack linguistically or culturally (211). I am also impressed by the critic's refusal to "beat [the novel's final scene] into a convenient shape with a critical shovel," a decision that encourages reader to continue asking the questions Coetzee raises in his novel. Bravo, Rita!
For tomorrow: Read another article or, if I'd like, work on my bibliography or watch Dust.
Work Cited
Barnard, Rita. "J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and the South African Pastoral." Contemporary Literature 44.2 (2003): 199-224.
I'm still really irritated with myself, largely because I am working at a snail's pace. There are really two main reasons for this:
Uno: I have been sleeping in so late that, by the time I finally get started, it feels as if I have already been procrastinating all day. Somehow, this tendency translates into a sense of having already struggled to get through whatever it is I am about to begin. Needless to say, this isn't a good feeling to have when setting out do something.
Dos: Having spent so much time reading fiction -- which is much easier for me to get through than the critical writing I am reading now -- I have grown accustomed to reading more in a shorter time span than is possible when reading the dense scholastic prose I have been working with the past few days.
At any rate, I read Kimberly Wedeven Segall's "Pursuing Ghosts: The Traumatic Sublime in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace" yesterday and I just finished Gareth Cornwell's "Realism, Rape, and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace" a few moments ago. I'd actually read Segall's essay before, but re-read it to refresh my memory as I shift my focus from The Master of Petersburg to Disgrace. Although I generally dislike psychoanalytic criticism, I find that the rationale behind Segall's essay is not unreasonable. While the essay did occasionally strike me as a bit too Freudian and there are a few blatant misreadings sprinkled throughout the article (Segall identifies David Lurie as the narrator and claims that Melanie Isaacs attempts suicide), the bulk of the paper deals with the the ways in which David Lurie sublimates the traumatic experiences of his time in Grahamstown, creating "ghostly" presences with which he may interact (via dreams) and address the anxiety he feels.
Segall distinguishes the "traumatic sublime" from the classical sublime of Longius (in which art can bring about ekstasis), Edmund Burke's Gothic sublime (in which great art sparks such a strong sense of terror in one's mind that an awareness of self is utterly impossible), and the Romantic sublime of William Wordsworth (where art so enraptures an individual that one's sense of self expands):
In what I am calling the traumatic sublime, in contrast [to the earlier conceptions of literary sublimity], experiences of violence are changed into images of oppressed subjects and ghosts. These images of ghostly figures serve as troubling memory sites. Because these disturbing memories are not easily ignored nor assimilated into a narrative of identity, these mnemonic images resist a complete erasure of the past, especially in a postcolonial setting where there is a historical legacy of violation. With their uneasy sublimation of the past, these identity-fracturing traumatic images pose a potential crisis for the protagonist. These ghostly images represent the friction between traumatic images and identity. The traumatic sublime, as a troubling sensation that occurs when a painful event of the past is changed into a disturbing image, shifts the gaze from the self to an-other. Unlike the gothic loss of self or the romantic expansion of self, the traumatic sublime alters the focus from the protagonist to another character...As in the uncanny, the traumatic sublime uses symbols and disturbing images to reformulate a character's past... (42)
Essentially, unresolved traumas (those the individual cannot confront directly) manifest themselves as new ghostly images that produce similar anxieties as the original traumatic experiences, but projected outward. In other words, when the individual cannot directly confront a trauma he or she has experienced, the traumatic sublime allows him or her to envision the pain in another, detached form and address it from a "safe" distance. In Disgrace, Segall argues, "[t]he sublimated ghostly bodies all lead to the central signified of Lucy's raped body," preventing Lurie from blocking the memory of her rape and forcing him to confront it. In doing so, the traumatic sublime brings violation and subjugation to the front of Lurie's consciousness, highlighting those instance in which he himself has played a part. Haunted by these ghosts, Lurie begins the moral transformation so many critics view as central to the novel.
Gareth Cornwell, I have to admit, amuses me to no end. Eschewing the "logical and historical emptiness" of "post-Saussurean, Derridean" readings of Disgrace, Cornwell opts to make "a couple of common-sense observations" (311). He also criticizes "the metaphysical dread to which Derridean differance can lead if we are prepared to take its anti-realism too seriously":
[M]eaning endlessly deferred as words drop their eyes and shake their heads in embarassment, gesturing towards their equally feckless fellows, abdicating their own authority to signify, and performing an empty act of delegation. (311)
Seriously, that has to be one of the absolute greatest assessments of Derridean excess ever published in a major literary journal.
That said, Cornwell makes many solid observations about Disgrace. His essay deals primarily with the text's use of the realist mode to present David and Lucy Lurie's stories. Ultimately, Cornwell concludes that Coetzee fashions a plot out of the seemingly contradictory antirealist allegorical and the realist mimetic modes of representation, thereby reflecting "Coetzee's abiding ambivalence towards realism and his suspicion of the reflexivity of antirealism or 'antiillusionism' as the alternative."
For tomorrow: Read another article.
Works Cited
Cornwell, Gareth. "Realism, Rape, and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Critique 43.4 (2002): 307-322.
Segall, Kimberly Wedeven. "Pursuing Ghosts: The Traumatic Sublime in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Research in African Literatures 36.4 (2005): 40-54.
After last night's epic effort, I will keep this entry on the short side. Despite the persistence of my screwed up sleep schedule, I didn't sleep in too late today and managed to review two essays dealing with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, Isidore Diala's "Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and Andre Brink: Guilt, Expiation, and the Reconciliation Process in Post-Apartheid South Africa" (which, annoyingly, was poorly photocopied and will have to be replaced) and Jacqueline Rose's "Apathy and Accountability: South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Comission." Neither article devotes more than a few pages to Disgrace, but I found both to be extremely readable and, especially in the case of Diala's essay, quite quotable (a trait any beleaguered dissertation-writer will love).
Diala's reading of Disgrace is consistent with much of the critical literature surrounding the novel:
Coetzee's black characters are perhaps too deprived, brutalized, and aggrieved to inspire hopes of racial harmony. Coetzee hardly seems to be under any delusions of the immediate possibility of reconciliation so soon after apartheid. (68)
...if Lucy's mode of engagement with history is Coetzee's valid paradigm for whites' negotiation for a precarious foothold in post-apatheid South Africa, then his conception of their fall from grace evokes near absolute depravity. (60)
After a lengthy discussion of the TRC, Rose shares a reading of the novel "as Coetzee's response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission" (191).
While neither essay explores the novel in depth, I would say that they are both extremely good starting points for anyone interested in one of the more popular (and plausible) interpretations of Disgrace.
For tomorrow: Read another article or, if I'd prefer, transcribe notes or work on my bibliography.
Works Cited
Diala, Isadore. "Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, and Andre Brink: Guilt, Expiation, and the Reconciliation Process in Post-Apartheid South Africa." Journal of Modern Literature 25.2 (2001-2002): 50-68.
Rose, Jacqueline. "Apathy and Accountability: South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission." Raritan 21.4 (2002): 175-95.
Just to be clear, my yesterday ended around the time most people in my time zone began their todays, so, in the following paragraphs, you can think of my "yesterday" as "early this morning" and my "today" as "this afternoon and early evening."
Well, yesterday started out like pretty much any other day, with me waking up at the crack of dusk, stretching, and really not wanting to read any literary criticism. Anyway, sensing that I would not get much reading done at home, I decided to stay outside of my house (i.e. far away from the sundry temptations of my bed, punk 'zines, internet, cat, and crossword puzzles) to try to focus on what promised to be a long read. The day started out nicely enough: I managed to catch a late (like, 12-14 hours late) breakfast at Denny's, where I read a few pages of Gilbert Yeoh's "Negotiating Foundations: Nation, Homeland and Land in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Having finished my Belgain waffle, I drove over to a cafe to read some more and, with a satisfying cup of peppermint herbal tea, I plodded through a few more pages. Then the cafe closed and I had to return home.
Enter the distractions. Between the purring and hand-licking of what may well be the world's cutest (and, at least among my friends, most popular) feline and the constant urge to procrastinate by screwing around on the internet, I did not get much done. I did, however, spend a good deal of time planning an evening of music-listening and relaxation. You know, for the many hours of empty leisure time I would no doubt enjoy as soon as I finished the article.
By the time two-something A.M. rolled around, I realized that I'd
barely read ten pages all day. As the temptation to call it a night grew stronger, I decided to motivate myself to read a bit more of the essay by promising myself -- ahem -- lunch from McDonald's.
So, by the time three-something flashed on the clock, I dragged my sleepy body over to the local death-by-cholesterol dealer, and came upon a "brilliant" idea: why not, said I to myself, drive to the local 24-hour Wal*Mart and read in the dim light of the parking lot? Responding to myself, I said, God, that's stupid. Okay, I'm in.
Now, as incredibly stupid as it sounds, I stand by my decision. Here's why:
1. I wanted to stay awake long enough to finish the essay.
2. I wanted to go to bed before finishing the essay.
3. Removing myself from the vicinity of the bed would make sleeping in bed well neigh impossible.
4. The greater the distance from bed, the greater the possibility that I would not return to bed until I had finished what I set out to do.
5. I enjoy really stupid things. The idea of reading an essay on intertextuality and apartheid politics in the dim light cast by a retail store's parking lamp, then, struck me as at least as amusing as it was moronic.
6. I find that, if enclosed in a television-less, internet-less space, I have a much easier time focusing on things that do not engage my immediate interest.
Not only did my strategy work, I had the wonderful opportunity to watch bread delivery trucks unload their wares, laconic cart-collecting employees collect carts laconically, and campers unable or unwilling to find a campground park for the night. Oh, my friends, it was bliss. Of course, with the coming of daylight came the first trickle of customers, so I returned home, determined more than ever to finish the essay, which I did sometime before seven in the morning.
That said, I would not have finished the essay had I not felt obliged to report on it here. I would have slacked off and I would have probably done the same today as I recuperated from my -- shall we say, unnatural? -- schedule.
Part the Second
Anyway, I did struggle to get through Gilbert Yeoh's essay, which I found to be, by turns, both insightful and far-fetched. As the title indicates, Yeoh is concerned with the notion of South African foundations, both literal and figurative. The first third of his essay consists of a rather unconvincing argument for a perceived intertextual relationship between Disgrace and Homer's Odyssey (as well as related canonical texts such as Joyce's Ulysses), a relationship Yeoh suggests highlights a post-Apartheid "homecoming" for native black South Africans (the Odysseus figures) return to reclaim their homeland. Besides not being convinced by Yeoh's argument, I found the implications of his reading to be highly disturbing.
Lucy Lurie, Yeoh would have us believe, is Coetzee's Penelope-figure, "[David] Lurie parallels the defiant suitors" while Petrus and the men who rape Lucy supposedly mirror Odysseus triumphantly returning to Ithaca (2). His main point seems to be that the violence and intensity of the rape scene draws upon the Homeric celebration of Odysseus's noble revenge against the men who have wronged him by courting his wife and wrecking his home in order to dramatize a particularly frightening possibility plaguing the imaginations of the white minority in post-Apartheid South Africa: that the cumulative pain of the atrocities committed by whites against blacks since South Africa was first colonized by Europeans will result in violent acts of vengeance. Since the Christian-inspired ethics of forgiveness and amnesty promoted by Desmond Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Yeoh informs us, the consequent Human Rights Violations (HRV) hearings sought to force victims of state-sponsored human rights violations to accept the confessions of and forgive those who had mistreated them in the name of national unity. An utterly insufficient solution, the TRC and HRV could not possibly erase the centuries of horrible mistreatment and, as a result, whites feared massive acts of vengeance fueled by the TRC's policy of forgiving the essentially unforgivable.
Though Yeoh's parallels strike me as wholly unconvincing, I am more disturbed by the implications of his reading of Lucy's rape. In comparing the rapists to Odysseus, Yeoh seems to imply -- perhaps inadvertently -- that they are somehow in the right, that their atrocity is ultimately justified (as, indeed, Lucy wonders) by the fact that it is an act of reclamation carried out against an aspect of colonial presence. What I wonder is whether Yeoh actually wishes to suggest the crime has a positive aspect. It would seem to me that the old adage that two wrongs do not make a right is at least part of Coetzee's message. Furthermore, as other critics (including Florence Stratton, who I will discuss shortly) have noted, the depiction of black men raping white a white woman, if anything, taps into a deep-rooted colonialist bias.
Still, I do like some of Yeoh's observations about the relationship of the South African to the land, especially those he makes in the second third of his essay, devoted to Coetzee's use of South African pastoral imagery and ideology. If anything, Yeoh's intertextual reading is an elaborately-supported one, but may well be the result of a troubling aspect of literary criticism: since jobs and reputations are largely based upon one's published work, laying claim to a new reading or novel interpretation of a text can help establish a scholar. Perhaps Yeoh's unconvincing reading is the result of an honest desire to plant the first flag on an uncolonized (hah!) critical planet?
At any rate, the second section of the essay, as I mentioned, deals with a critique of the South African pastoral genre pioneered by Olive Schreiner and Pauline Smith and, especially, of the Afrikaans plaasromans of C. M. van der Heever. In what is probably among the strongest readings of Coetzee's novel, Yeoh demonstrates how David Lurie's constant misreadings of his daughter's actions as attempts to secure a bucolic idyll consistent with the romanticized depictions of rural life in van der Heever's farm novels reveal the inadequacy of pastoral narratives of rootedness as a means to understand Lucy's tenacious will to continue living on in the Eastern Cape after her rape.
Despite a seemingly gratuitous use of Samuel Beckett's trilogy to illustrate the tendency for people to proceed beyond an endpoint, the final section of Yeoh's essay seems to venerate Lucy's acquiescent tenacity as the necessary component in negotiating an existence in the oft-discussed "New South Africa."
Part the Third
Since I had a couple of chores I needed to get done today, I managed to leave the house with several hours of daylight yet to be enjoyed. And, seriously, there was daylight. Lots of it. The sight of green mountains on a sunny day never fails to please me. So, today started off rather well.
Though I did feel sleepy and wanted to return to bed, I decided to sit in the mall, in air-conditioned bliss. Auntie Anne, of course, always makes things better. Again, I figured that keeping myself away from my house would make working easier. It did. But I also had a second reason for selecting the mall as a good place to read at 5:45 in the afternoon: when I was younger, my roommate was pretty money-conscious and rarely used the air conditioning in our apartment. As a result of her adamant frugality (which, as it turns out, is wise), I took to driving to the Mall of America to read. I recall enjoying the air conditioning so much that I would plough right through Moby-Dick and Underworld while sitting at a sufficiently isolated Caribou Coffee table. Malls, it seems, do not distract me. It's odd, but somehow the crowds and the advertising and the usually shitty music tend to recede into the background, leaving me with enough white noise to focus on the task at hand.
So I went to the mall and finished my reading much earlier than I had anticipated.
Part the Fourth
The essay I read this evening, Florence Stratton's "Imperial Fictions: J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace" is a good example of the negative criticism that followed the publication of the novel in 1999. Although Stratton claims to be one of only a very few critics who have discussed racial coding in Disgrace, she is, in fact, one of many commentators to find fault with the author's treatment of black characters in the novel. That said, Stratton does make many solid points about the racist, colonialist assumptions embedded in Disgrace, but she faults Coetzee for Lurie's racist failings, citing what she considers the author's inability to fully ironize aspects of the text.
At times, Stratton seems rather racist herself, accusing Coetzee of fashioning a text that reproduces many of the more lamentable racist assumptions held by some whites in South Africa and abroad. Occasionally, she makes a good observation. More often than not, however, Stratton seems set on expressing a political agenda and reading it into Disgrace, even when the text does not support her claims. For instance, when David expresses a concern for Lucy's health after her rape, he suggests that she be tested for HIV. While most people would agree that such a concern is natural for a parent of a child raped by strangers, Stratton uses the question as justification for launching a diatribe on colonialist construction of the other as a hypersexualized "bearer of frightening disease" (90):
Coetzee is, here, evidentially treating his character ironically. For in the narrative, he deconstructs the colonial differential between the morally pure European and the depraved African by characterizing David, himself, as hypersexual. The identification of Africans with HIV/AIDS remains, however, intact in the narrative. For though David apparently engages in unprotected sex -- condoms are only mentioned with reference to David's affair with Bev Shaw (149-150) -- and though he has multiple (literally hundreds of) sexual partners (192), no suggestion is ever made, not by his ex-wife who berates him on other topics, or even Melanie's enraged father, that David might be a source of HIV/AIDS infection. (91)
Of course, Stratton neglects to consider several key factors:
1. While the text only mentions David's use of condoms once, Coetzee never pens a passage saying David does not use a condom (or that the woman does not use contraception). He may or he may not. Any assumption is presumptuous.
2. If HIV and AIDS are associated with Africans, as Stratton suggests is often the case among those enmeshed in colonialist discourses, the fact that David has sex with Melanie (whose race Stratton discusses at length) would seem to suggest that David does not share this association.
3.Disgrace is written from David's perspective. For all we know, he has been tested for AIDS on a regular basis, but he hasn't expressed that in the narrative. Again, any assumptions about what Lurie does or does not do are presumptuous.
In other words, Stratton seems so eager to make Coetzee appear racist that she twists the facts.
