--REVIEWED By NAVAL LANGA
I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction. -- J. M. Coetzee
A Novel Narrating Painful Social Changes
If you have a deep love for extra beautiful literature, and if you have enough room for reading a novel twice, at least, then J M Coetzee has a lot of things to offer. The winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in the year 2003, J M Coetzee is a man of his own class, an engineer with his own set of tools.
His novels are thick with real-world and human miseries. He based his
writings on the events happening in his surrounding. He did so at least up to
the date he had written his very famous novel ‘Disgrace’. He had tried a novel
technique of blending facts and fiction in his next novel
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When Disgrace was awarded the prize, J. M. Coetzee became the first novelist to pocket Man Booker Prize twice. In ‘Disgrace’ he tries painting the landscape of a country, |
It is a tale of the time when the regime trading apartheid has just closed its shutters and people are yet to be adjusted to the change of climate. They are free in any respect; they have wings of the changed perception of their own. They have a multitude of newly formed rules to follow.
The country is virtually lawless in rural
sides where David and his daughter reside. They face a spell of legal emptiness
which is agonizing; especially for a man like David. Coetzee narrates
David as: ‘His temperament is not going to change; he is too old for
that.’ In South Africa of David, there is a mass violation
of the laws. Under such circumstances, one would find the future dark.
His daughter is made of different soil.
After going through the life of a vagabond and leaving the company of a lesbian
friend behind, Lucy tries to settle herself in the new environment. The changed
scenario of the country has put a strange situation before her. She tailors a
novel solution for surviving in the new world. She rears dogs for sale; she
produces vegetables and flowers on her
THE PLOT: A STORY OF NATIONAL DISGRACE
Disgrace - A Novel With a Strange Plot Set
by J. M. Coetzee
The Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee,
become the first writer to get the Man Booker Prize twice when he got it for
his novel ‘disgrace’. The novel has a simple and linear plot. It
essentially starts when David Lurie, the protagonist of the novel, enters into
a corporeal act with one of his students.
Caught in a fix, the student registers a complaint about sexual harassment against him. In spite of strong suggestions by his colleagues to deny and defend the allegations of having sex with the girl, Professor David Lurie accepts the allegations.
Thus in becoming honest to
his acts, he invites the obvious ouster from the job. The life of disgrace
starts from this point.
He goes to live with his daughter, Lucy.
After being disgraced, and while living at the farm owned by Lucy, he wakes up
into another world. He encounters a world where people have to sacrifice most
of their legitimate rights. He met the people who have to compromise on
seemingly odd issues.
He lodges complain about his car, but Lucy
denies registering a complaint against those who have raped her. It is the cost
of living on the land: that is what she believes. When her father tells her to
“Sell up”, she refuses. Here David learns a chapter in parenthood. There comes
a date when children start living without the help of their biblical cord,
parental assistance.
Lucy is more stable in her life, remaining
attached to her own piece of land. In a way, she responds more logically to the
challenges of life, in comparison to her desperate father who has frequented
prostitutes searching for the meaning of life. He accepts reality in a
strange way. She decides to bear the child of the neo-oppressor, therapists. It
reveals how a woman can get adjusted to a changing environment. Those who
are unaware of
Disgrace - A Novel Narrating Characters
Facing Strange Situations in Life
Nobel prize winner
writer J. M. Coetzee presently lives in
In ‘Disgrace’, the novelist puts forward a question about when the disgrace starts. The protagonist enters into an unethical act with one of his students; it is not rape per se. She is not a minor; she is not abducted; she is not subjected to any force. But the girl remains muted during the process; where David the protagonist enjoys himself. Here the same thing is not perceived in the same sense.
A man and a woman are required
to see the ‘same thing’ in the ‘same sense’, especially in sexual matters. If the
weaker partner, here the woman, feel cheated, the period of grace is over and
the ‘disgrace’ starts.
Apart from this, Coetzee narrates another
type of ‘disgrace’, too. Living under the apartheid-infected air of
He acts like a wild cat sitting on the chest
of its prey. And every time, the cat leaves us spilling blood. However when the
‘Barbarians Are coming’ or the shadows of ‘Age of Iron’ are hovering over
the characters of his novels, he honesty searches for a possible way-out for
them. In ‘Disgrace’ he paints a picture of a different life; the life that the
‘whites’ of
After the fall of apartheid rules, the thinking of local people has changed. The natives start disliking the ‘holding of the land’ by ‘white’ people. Lucy has a servant, Petrus. He is a native. He now puts forward a strange proposal. He believes that her holdings would remain safe if Lucy becomes his second wife.
A locally influential leader and his men visit
her house with a clear-cut design. They gang-rape her. The lesson rapists want
to convey is simple: hand over our land; bear our children, and remain alive.
They hate Lucy’s unencumbered ownership of a plough-able piece of land.
This is the disgrace, Coetzee wants to
narrate.
J M COETZEE'S STYLE AND NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE
Literature provides us with some light in the darkness. The great thinkers and their writings have upgraded literature to the level of religion in the secularized section of people. Keeping pace with this movement for providing primal education, J. M. Coetzee, a Nobel Prize-winning writer has carved out a striking example in his novel ‘Disgrace’.
This novel has won the Man Booker Prize. By winning this Prize,
Coetzee has become the only writer winning this prize twice.
While reading Coetzee, humour would hardly fail in easing our strains. It would make our mind lighter by the passages loaded with visible and hidden meanings. Had Coetzee been not a humorist as he is, he would have been branded as a rebellion for selecting the subjects of his writings. He might have found his place just beside Nelson Mandela.
But he happens to be a writer. The writer is a warrior fighting with the arsenal of his words, the words flowing through his mighty pen. It is the strongest part of the story woven in his novel ‘Disgrace’ that he does not allow the protagonist to run away.
Under the given circumstances he had the option to get
away with the inquiry set up against him. Instead, he accepts responsibility for what he has done.
The visual metaphors used in narrating the scenes carry us to the place and in the time where the characters of the novel are struggling to live. Nowhere the narration seems very dramatic.
Lucy’s rape, an act of the highest insult a man can do to a woman is narrated in a few lines. These lines are emphatically convincing. The challenges the characters in ‘Disgrace’ face is just like other common people. But their responses to these challenges are quite different.
That is how the literature in general and a writer, in particular, provide us with the light in the darkness. Coetzee narrates this darkness in a very impressive manner. J M Coetzee is a master of the art of telling stories. He makes the readers feeling immediately identified with the characters.
In ‘Disgrace’, the writer puts us in the midst of an
environment in which events are happening. The vivid description of college
activities and the way in which students behave with their studies make us
believe the scenes. They all look like parts of our day-to-day life.
Novels written by Coetzee are filled with
irony and satire. His writings entertain the readers according to their
intellectual heights. In the case of ‘Disgrace’, the thematic compulsions and
perpetual happenings of sad events restrained him from becoming an outright
humorist. But he has counterbalanced it by putting lightweight words in the
blank spaces lying between two sentences.
[Images courtesy
Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
