foxinthestars

I read J.M.Coetzee's Disgrace in January. I had tried it once before, so I knew going in that I would dislike it. If Coetzee had set out to write a novel designed to make me froth at the mouth, he couldn't have done much better. It infuriates me enough to get me to finally break my renovations-induced social media break.

Spoilers ahoy. (Also, CW for rape.)

The protagonist of Disgrace is David Lurie, a middle-aged professor at a South African university, where he teaches a subject he feels is beneath him. When he's not teaching, he's avoiding writing a chamber opera about Byron, having sex with younger women, and generally being an ass. He pressures his student, Melanie Isaacs, into having "an affair" with him. (The reason for the quotes will become clear soon.) When caught, he refuses to show regret, loses his job, and decides to go visit his daughter Lucy.

Things happen, Lucy gets raped, David is incensed (oh, the irony), yadda yadda, something something, the end. It's mostly a technically proficient novel, though the prose can get curiously purple at times. I think it's all style and no substance, though. It fails, IMO, because Coetzee doesn't have a good enough understanding of sexual violence to be writing a book that centers on sexual violence.

As you can see, I don't think much of it. It's a book that tries so hard to shock that its shock-value seems to be its main purpose.

However, the most infuriating thing about Disgrace is not Disgrace itself. It's the blurb. The edition I read said:

"David Lurie ... has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry."

That's utter horseshit. David Lurie doesn't have an affair with Melanie Isaacs. David Lurie does a Neil Gaiman and pressures his student into having sex with him. At least one of their sexual encounters is outright rape, for all that David calls it "[n]ot rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core." (Chapter 3)

In that scene, Melanie outright tells him no and struggles against him, but he forces himself on her anyway. In all the scenes, Melanie is clearly a reluctant participant. David stalks her and deliberately takes her by surprise so that she won't be able to find the words to say no. And Melanie, predictably, starts cutting class and avoiding David right after their first sexual encounter.

And this is what the publisher chose to describe as an affair gone sour. What the everloving fuck?

Disgrace revolves around rapes both brutal and more subtle, yes, but it also revolves around rape and sexual violence on a meta level, at least in my mind. I spent the whole book wondering if Coetzee realises he wrote David Lurie as a rapist. Half the time I thought he couldn't possibly have written the book the way he did without understanding that, but the other half I thought that no, maybe he really doesn't understand.

Disgrace draws attention to the ways people like David Lurie get away with rape. The men who raped Lucy get away, too, though I think that's probably the part where Coetzee comments on modern South African history and which therefore I have zero competence to comment on myself. But the way Lurie gets away with rape is the way men like him get away with rape everywhere: by doing it (mostly) by coercion rather than physical violence and by being in a position of authority. By being powerful. After all, the only reason Lurie loses his job is because he refuses to pay lip service to the concept of regret.

So does Coetzee realise Lurie is a rapist? I'm not sure, but there'd be plenty of people who wouldn't call him that. Coetzee's publisher certainly didn't.