The Politics of Shame and Redemption in J. M. Coetzee'sDisgrace

Abstract

In both J. M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace (1999) and André Brink's The Rights of Desire (2000), a middle-aged or older male protagonist (Coetzee's David Lurie is 52; Brink's Ruben Olivier is 65) has what might be seen as a final fling (or, in David Lurie's Romantic version, "a last leap of the flame of sense before it goes out"—27) via a relationship with a much younger woman—in both cases, a university student—and faces life-changing decisions about work, life, and ethics. Brink's novel takes up a phrase from Disgrace—David's words to his daughter, Lucy: "I rest my case on the rights of desire"—and uses them to explore Ruben's "right to be frustrated, to be denied" in his sex life, his social interaction, and his place within postapartheid South Africa as a displaced Afrikaans librarian. Coetzee's novel, however, is about much more than this rather narrow reading of desire and it is on this novel rather than Brink's that I will concentrate. Disgrace is a complex exploration of the collision between private and public worlds; intellect and body; desire and love; and public disgrace or shame and the idea of individual grace or salvation. Set in a recognizably postapartheid South Africa, it is also concerned with what David Attwell and Barbara Harlow have called "the refashioning of identities caught between stasis and change" (see Attwell and Harlow). This paper will explore some of these aspects of the novel.

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