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DISGRACE, reviewed by Stephen Clark

It’s another year of Hollywood in blackface. Three films  dealing with blacks came to us all at once. PRECIOUS, where, after dealing with 200 plus pound welfare mammies on the streets and in the grocery line hullking fore and aft, I’m to watch how sensitive and tragic their lives are. I’ll pass. There’s THE BLIND SIDE, where Sandra Bullock takes in a black boy, and her family raises him to become a football star, based on a real-life story. It’s an example of feel-good (‘Jesus-football-negroes’).  And there is INVICTUS, where Nelson Mandela and South African rugby team do a kumbaya to show racial unity. No films about Santa or Jesus, but our real gods seem to be sports and diversity. So I’m reading books.

I just finished J.M. Coetzee’s DISGRACE, published in 1999. Coetzee, a South African writer, won the Booker prize with this study of a man’s decline in the new South Africa, one that isn’t necessarily new and improved.  David Lurie is a professor of literature, in his fifties, a character found in much contemporary literature, the college professor who bangs his students while he wonders about death, existence, and culture. A similar Jewish version is in Phillip Roth’s THE DYING ANIMAL, and John Updike created several studies of academic roistering.  As one of his characters remarks in MEMOIRS OF THE FORD ADMINISTRATION, getting a crack at the more nubile students was considered one of the perks of academia.

David teaches at Capetown University College just after the whites caved in. The Great Rationalization has come, which to David means dumbing down. The school becomes Cape Technical University. His lit courses are replaced by Communications 101, 201, etc. He is allowed one lit course a semester because it’s good for morale. He teaches Wordsworth. His morale is also kept up by sex. Divorced, with one daughter who lives in a lesbian commune, David sees Soroya, an employee of Discreet Escorts. He enjoys her Indian features and the clockwork manner of her lovemaking. She doesn’t get in the way. Life is good. Or is it?

‘Is he happy? By most measurements, yes…however,
he has not forgotten the last chorus of OEDIPUS:
Call no man happy until he is dead.’

Soroya leaves the company. David tries to contact her, but the agency won’t tell him where she went. They cheerfully offer other exotics: Malaysian, Chinese, Thai: you name it.

David picks a secretary from his office. She complains about drug peddlers hanging around her son’s school. Now the police do nothing. She and her husband are on the list to emigrate to New Zealand. She envies David’s generation, how they had it easier. He asks what she means. ‘Now people just pick and choose which laws they want to obey. It’s anarchy. How can you bring up children when there’s anarchy all around?’ David has no answer. They have sex, but she’s too emotional for him. David wonders if the proper business of the old is preparing to die. He notices Melanie Isaacs, one of his Wordsworth students. David meets her on the street, takes her to his place and seduces her. She doesn’t show the usual gratitude or control he expects from lovemaking. She disappears from class. Won’t take her exams. David is concerned.

He should be.  Her father has lodged a charge of sexual harassment against him. The Committee judging him is made up of foreign names: Hakim, Manas, Farodia. David offers no defense. He was wrong, and will take his punishment. The committee is astounded, and insist on some kind of defense.

No. David was wrong, and he’ll take his punishment.  He is kicked off the staff.  David later explains to Lucy, his daughter, that the Committee wanted more than repentance. They wanted grovelling, counseling:

‘It reminds me too much of Mao’s China. Recantation, self-criticism, public apology. I’m old-fashioned. I would prefer simply to be put against a wall and shot. Have done with it.’

Without his job, David is adrift in the new South Africa, a useless white man. He decides to visit Lucy and take a holiday. She is the amiable, thoughtful kind of woman you see in natural fibers or signing petitions. She calls David by his first name, and wonders at his disgrace: ‘You shouldn’t be so unbending. It isn’t heroic to be unbending.’

Lucy’s life is anything but heroic. Her lesbian friends have taken off,  best not to mention what happened. She grows vegetables. Daffodils. Looks after dogs people leave while on vacation, although one dog’s owners have taken off, leaving it abandoned. The kennel’s yapping bothers David as he starts on a new project, an opera about Byron and his younger mistress.

David meets Petrus, a black man who…is what? He used to work Lucy’s farm, but in the new South Africa he’s become a ‘co-proprietor’, and has two wives. He does serious farming and can no longer be the ‘dog man’ and look after the kennel. David takes on this task. He feels cozy in Lucy’s world, ‘of dogs and daffodils’, of   ‘the way her bare toes grip the red earth, leaving clear prints.’ She and petrus sell vegetables at the local market. She reads EDWIN DROOD in bed.

Lucy introduces David to Bev Shaw, who runs an animal shelter, ‘…Dumpy, cropped hair, no neck.’ She and her equally nondescript husband are too amateurish to heal the animals, mostly dogs that the blacks can’t and won’t care for:

‘The trouble is, there are just too many of them, says Bev Shaw. “They don’t understand it, of course…they would just multiply and multiply if they had their way, until they filled the earth. They don’t think it’s a bad thing to have lots of offspring. The more the jollier.’

Is Bev describing dogs or blacks?  In the country, all seems to run together.  David and Lucy’s idyllic life ends when three men come to the house. They are allowed to make a phone call, but David and Lucy are overpowered. She is raped. David is knocked out and set on fire, but it is only lighter fluid and not petrol, so he is just burned. The men take the rifle Lucy had but never used, shoot all the dogs, then rob the house and drive off in David’s car.  Lucy shouted for Petrus. Oddly enough, Petrus was nowhere to be had.

Lucy is in shock and retreats to her room. David takes charge. The police are called. They are polite and in crisp uniforms, but seem unable to help. Ettinger, a neighbor, a crusty old German who is armed, does what he can.  ‘The best is, you save yourself, because the police are not going to save you, not any more, you can be sure.’

David runs the farm while Lucy hides. Petrus reappears.  ‘Yes,’ Petrus says, ‘It is very bad, a very bad thing. But you are all right now.’  Not a word about Lucy. David thinks:

‘Because of the disgrace. Because of the shame. That is what the visitors have achieved; that is what they have done…they put her in her place, how they showed her what a woman was for.’

David comes to rely on Petrus:

‘What appeals to him is Petrus is his face and hands. If there is such a thing as honest toil, then Petrus bears its marks. A peasant, a PAYSAN, a man of the country. A plotter and schemer and no doubt a liar too, like peasants everywhere. Honest toil and honest cunning.’

His respect for Petrus is mixed with suspicion while he recognizes Lucy is an amateur farmer compared to Petrus. David imagines Petrus would like to have Ettinger’s land, but the tough old German is armed, has barbed wire, a fellow peasant ready to fight back. Yet Ettinger’s son fled to Germany. Peasants, in order to survive, must have sons. Ettinger failed.

Unable to help Lucy, David returns to the city to catch up on things. Stragglers now live on the roadside. A mob broke into his apartment and ransacked it.  He wonders if his Beethoven tapes were used, or simply tossed on the rubbish. The police call him. His car is found. He goes to the station, but it’s the wrong car. The police don’t care. You want it or not? It’s an eerie reminder when Petrus said he’d get his car back. All would be well.

David’s opera about Byron and his mistress comes and goes. He tries to compose on an old banjo. An opera for banjo.

David visits Mr. Isaacs, Melanie’s father. Isaacs insists on David having dinner with the family as an act of Christian forgiveness, but the tension at dinner isn’t forgiving.  David sees Melanie in a play, a terrible new piece with a gay hairdresser and black customer. Melanie’s performance matches the mediocre play. He returns to the farm.

Lucy, now semi-recovered, tells David she is pregnant. He is outraged. ‘Already he is calling it the CHILD when it is no more than a worm in his daughter’s womb’,  Lucy marked ‘like a dog’s urine.’  She and David go to a party at Petrus’s hut to celebrate a new marriage. It is best to stay on good terms with him. There, the only whites among a large clan, David stiffens.  Among Petrus’s clan is one of the rapists.

He is Pollux, a boy with ‘flat expressionless face and piggish eyes.’ David is furious. Lucy cautions him to do nothing. David insists Lucy leave the farm. She won’t. Anyway, she says ‘it’s not a farm…It’s just a piece of land where I grow things.’

David angrily confronts Petrus. Send Pollux away? Petrus is indifferent:

‘Now I must tell him to go away because of this thing that has happened?
You come to look after your child. I also look after my child.’
‘Your child? Now he is your child, this Pollux?’
‘Yes. He is a child. He is my family, my people.’
So that is it. No more lies. MY PEOPLE. As naked an answer as he could wish. Well, Lucy is HIS PEOPLE.’

Petrus says it is bad, but also ‘It is finish.’ He proposes marriage. Not between Pollux and Lucy, for the boy is too young, between him and Lucy. David is outraged at Petrus’s calm.  Petrus merely says that in the country it is dangerous for a woman to be alone. Now David sees it all. The rape was planned by Petrus to get Lucy’s land. Peasant cunning. While David, Lucy, and millions of whites went along with everything, they forgot Africa was always waiting to break out and return. Now that they gave up power, they must make their peace with it.

Lucy agrees to marry Petrus. She tries to calm David by saying it is only an alliance, not a real marriage where she won’t have to sleep with Petrus. But she needs protection.

David, when he returned, started having sex with Bev, both of them on the floor of the animal shelter. He still needs sex, even if its a fat loser like Bev. David decides to stay and help Lucy have the child, realising that for all her talk of an alliance, she is living on borrowed time. he takes on the job killing dogs at the animal shelter, even one he grew attatched to. He is alone. The dog man.

………….

DISGRACED has a cold, tragic feel to it. I was impressed by Coetzee’s style, and also his refusal to make a warm, fuzzy ending, with blacks and whites compromising into one world. No INVICTUS here. Against the hopeless ‘individualism’ of David and Lucy is a kaffir world that has all the warmth and pity of an ant colony.

I’m reminded of KING LEAR. Both stories have men and daughters who pay a price for giving up power. Lear’s vanity overcame his sense of survival, of not realising what chaos his abdication would send Britain into. I read DISGRACE as a study of a man’s inability to see his life in whole, and the penalty for losing touch of the world for the sake of immediate pleasure.  David and Lucy  are examples of bourgeois life and its inability to fight for its own survival.

DISGRACE is also like KING LEAR in that Lear, before he dies, at least gets to kill the man who hung Cordelia. When David sees Pollux peek in the window at Lucy dressing, he rages and decks him, then turns an old bulldog loose on the boy. Pollux runs off. ‘I will kill you!’ he shouts twice, surely a threat he’ll be able to make real when Petrus decides it’s convenient. When it comes time to do away with Lucy, Petrus, with Mandela’s leadership, won’t even have to make it look like and accident.

I’m sure Coetzee hasn’t intended DISGRACE as a warning to whites, merely a cool description of the end of two people’s comfortable and semi-meaningless lives; David and Lucy examples of Orwell describing Britain full of millions of civilized but useless people.  But Coetzee does offer a view of the realities of the new South Africa  that counters the relentlessly grinning face of Mandela.  He describes rape and agression, something the rest of  the world ignores.

It is necessary for DISGRACE to show whites impotent, for David to silently argue against using a gun. As Jean Raspail, author of THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS said, you may write about race and the whites reaction to becoming extinct, but you must never show them fighting back. Then it becomes Fascist, and won’t be printed. Needless to say, if Coetzee had shown David and Lucy fighting back or perhaps joining with Ettinger, DISGRACED wouldn’t have been published, let alone win the Booker prize.

…………..

This book is what I call the GRAN TORINO school of thought, where whites are shown confronted with a racially changing world that isn’t friendly to them. Now  that the white race seems heading for extinction, the establishment will allow it to  be talked about, since the race’s means of resistence are incapable of being roused.  I once wrote Harold Covington after I read his Northwest trilogy, asking if he would want to write about his experiences in Rhodesia, but he replied that we must write of no more defeats, but to prepare a new world and place for our race; perhaps an American Voortrek is all that will save us. DISGRACED had a powerful, moving effect on me, again in a way I’m sure Coetzee didn’t intend. It makes me more than ever want to see us unify to save ourselves.

…………….

Certainly DISGRACE reminds me of one of Dr. Pierce’s analogies. He tells of a Gypsy family that moves into your neighborhood. You and your church accept them; after all, you want to be fair. You meet the Gypsies at a party, especially liking an older Gypsy who seems to be civilized, is humorous, and a good neighbor.

Then things disappear from your garage. The noise from the Gypsies is loud. Some of their women take to doing tricks and inviting customers. You complain to the older Gypsy. He agrees. Some of your stolen goods are returned, and it gets quiet for awhile. Then it starts again. You see the old man, but now he shakes his head. They are, after all, his family, and he wishes he could do something, but…

‘And what you finally understand is that your Gypsy problem cannot be solved by thinking about your Gypsy neighbors as individuals. …as a whole they have ruined your neighborhood…if you want to solve this problem, it has to be solved as a whole.’

David would like to fight but can’t. Like Kowalski in GRAN TORINO, he’s too isolated and estranged from his communal sense to fight. Lucy is the female liberal, and when confronted with brute force and no one to guide her, simply submits, even though it’s a death sentence. Feminism is only a slow process of extinction.

………………

The canary in the mine shaft.  We’ve heard that analogy over and over, like others such as in harm’s way, the Hitler of our time…all the pat phrases the neocons want us to use to save Israel, the canary whose death will mean we’ll run out of air, that western civilization…the white world…will die unless we keep gallant little Israel alive. I think there is a canary, but it’s South Africa instead  of gallant little you-know-who. After all, Mandela and Obama have amazing similarities: both are black leftists with negligible political experience who smile a lot and seem less to have been elected than anointed by the media. And behind both lie Petrus and what he stands for.

DISGRACE is a  warning.