Disgrac a African by J.M. Coetzee

African Writing in English ENG-436
Double
Plot summary


Person constellation
Disgrace is the story of a South African professor of English who loses everything: his reputation, his job, his peace of mind, his good looks, his dreams of artistic success, and finally even his ability to protect his cherished daughter.
The novel tells the story of David Lurie, twice-divorced and dissatisfied with his job as a professor of Communication, teaching one specialized class in Romantic literature at a technical university in Cape Town in post-apartheid South Africa. His "disgrace" comes when he seduces one of his students and he does nothing to protect himself from its consequences. Lurie was working on Lord Byron at the time of his disgrace, and the irony is that he comes to grief from an escapade that Byron would have thought distinctly timid.[2] He is dismissed from his teaching position, after which he takes refuge on his daughter's farm in the Eastern Cape. For a time, his daughter's influence and natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. Shortly after becoming comfortable with rural life, he is forced to come to terms with the aftermath of an attack on the farm in which his daughter is raped and impregnated and he is brutally assaulted. In Disgrace, those who feel disgraced are also those who are punished.
[edit] Analysis
Any novel set in post-apartheid South Africa is fated to be read as a political portrait, but the fascination of Disgrace is the way it both encourages and contests such a reading by holding extreme alternatives in tension, salvation, ruin. In the new South Africa, violence is unleashed in new ways, and Lurie and his daughter become victims. The novel presents a bleak look of the country. It took its inspiration from social and political conflict of the country.[3]
As in all of his mature novels, Coetzee here deals with the theme of exploitation. His favorite approach has been to explore the innocuous-seeming use of another person to fill one's gentler emotional needs.[4] This is a story of both regional and universal significance. The central character is a confusing person, at once an intellectual snob who is contemptuous of others and also a person who commits outrageous mistakes. His story is also local, he is a white South African male in a world where such men no longer hold the power they once did. He is forced to rethink his entire world at an age when he believes he is too old to change and, in fact, should have a right not to.[5]
This is the second book by this author (after Life and Times of Michael K) where man is broken down almost to nothing before he finds some tiny measure of redemption in his forced acceptance of the realities of life and death. Coetzee has always situated his characters in extreme situations that compel them to explore what it means to be human.[6] There are many comparisons of human and animal existence in the novel. Though the novel is sparse in style, it covers a number of topics: personal shame, changing country, animal rights, romantic poetry and its symbolism[7].

Nov. 5, 1999 | In his sober, searing and even cynical little book "Disgrace," J.M. Coetzee tells us something we all suspect and fear -- that political change can do almost nothing to eliminate human misery. What it can do, he suggests, is reorder it a little and half-accidentally introduce a few new varieties. This view should not surprise any of the great South African novelist's readers. In his early-1980s masterpieces "Waiting for the Barbarians" and "Life & Times of Michael K" -- indeed, in all of his work -- political and historical forces blow through the lives of individuals like nasty weather systems, bringing with them a destruction that is all the more cruel for being impersonal. "Disgrace" is Coetzee's first book to deal explicitly with post-apartheid South Africa, and the picture it paints is a cheerless one that will comfort no one, no matter what race, nationality or viewpoint.
Last month "Disgrace" was awarded the Booker Prize, and it has undeniable echoes of "Michael K," Coetzee's 1983 Booker winner. In both books a man is broken down almost to nothing before he finds some tiny measure of redemption in his forced acceptance of the realities of life and death. But Professor David Lurie, the protagonist of "Disgrace," has farther to fall than Michael K, an unsophisticated Cape Town gardener. And the clarity David comes to at the end grows largely from his accepting an ever-increasing portion of pain. "One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet," he reflects. That sentence also describes Coetzee's notion of life in the new South Africa, where, as he portrays it, brutal tyranny has been replaced by brutal anarchy.

Rrdytfyyrt
A middle-aged, divorced scholar of Romantic poetry, David would have undoubtedly been a pathetic figure under the old regime -- one imagines an ineffectual white liberal teaching Wordsworth to bored Afrikaners while largely ignoring the atrocities perpetrated in his name. But in the Mandela era, David has become a victim of "the great rationalization": His university has been remade into a technical college, and he teaches courses in "communication skills" that he finds nonsensical. He is such a nonentity that the prostitute he patronizes weekly -- and for whom he has begun buying gifts -- stops receiving him. He imagines her and her colleagues shuddering over him "as one shudders at a cockroach in a washbasin in the middle of the night" and wonders if he can ask his doctor to castrate him as one neuters a domestic animal.
This is the first of the many comparisons of human and animal existence in "Disgrace." Coetzee has always situated his characters in extreme situations that compel them to explore what it means to be human, and before this novel is over, David must endure both psychological abasement and physical torment. But Coetzee has never before asked so clearly what it is not to be human. Later in the novel, after David has fallen into disgrace and fled Cape Town for his daughter Lucy's remote farm, she tells him, "This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals."
If David is reduced at times almost to an animal existence and finally to becoming a caretaker for dying animals, it is the mendacity of language that leads him there. Toward the end of the story, he reflects that the language he and others use has become "tired, friable, eaten from the inside as if by termites" and that he, an expert practitioner, is also hollow, "like a fly-casing in a spiderweb." When he is hauled before an academic tribunal after a misbegotten affair with a student, he refuses to defend himself against charges of sexual harassment. At first he resists the spectacle of public "prurience and sentiment" the committee expects. When he finally blurts out an apology, members of the tribunal refuse to be satisfied, demanding to know whether it reflects his sincere feelings and comes from his heart.
Coetzee seems to be attacking the New Age tyranny of therapeutic discourse here, but David's own language doesn't seem much more trustworthy. He rashly tells his judges that his liaison with the pretty and almost totally passive Melanie transformed him, if only briefly: "I was no longer a fifty-year-old divorc� at a loose end. I became a servant of Eros." Readers may well be repelled by David's arrogance, and his conduct with Melanie has fallen only a little short of rape. But judging him is not a simple matter. He is a student of Romanticism whose unrealized ambition is to write a chamber opera about Byron's life in Italy. No matter how little of our sympathy David may command, he has a point: If he genuinely believed his passion for Melanie was the real thing, the flame he had been waiting his whole life to feel, then how could he not pursue her avidly?
There is something fundamentally cryptic and unsummarizable about "Disgrace," but I read it as an almost metaphysical journey from this Romantic variety of love to the harsher, leaner strain David eventually learns from life on and around Lucy's farm. In Coetzee's fiction the stark and beautiful South African countryside has always played a half-allegorical role as both a destructive and a regenerative environment. He certainly can't be accused of sentimentalizing rural life; shortly after David goes to live with Lucy, a stolid lesbian who, like him, seems to have been abandoned by the world, they become victims of a vicious criminal assault that may not be as random as it first appears. Their relations with Petrus, the African farmer who is their nearest neighbor, become increasingly troubled and ambiguous. David volunteers to work for Bev, a friend of Lucy's who runs the local veterinary clinic, and comes to realize that Bev's primary role, in this impoverished land, is not to heal animals but to kill them with as much love and mercy as she can summon.
In the wake of the outrages committed against him and his daughter, David still struggles with language. His angry demands for justice get no response from the overstretched police, and his attempts to confront one of the assailants -- whom Petrus is apparently protecting -- produce only stony silences and baldfaced lies. Lucy seems to understand what David cannot: that to live where she lives she must tolerate brutalization and humiliation and simply keep going. "Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept," she tells her father. "To start at ground level. With nothing ... No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity ... Like a dog." If David actually reclaims some dignity by the end of "Disgrace," it is only because he gives up everything, gives up more than a dog ever could -- his daughter, his ideas about justice and language, his dream of the opera on Byron and even the dying animals he has learned to love without reservation, without thought for himself.
salon.com | Nov. 5, 1999

"Disgrace" by J.M. Coetzee
The winner of the 1999 Booker Prize is a bleak tale of human and animal misery in post-apartheid South Africa.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
BY ANDREW O'HEHIR
In his sober, searing and even cynical little book "Disgrace," J.M. Coetzee tells us something we all suspect and fear -- that political change can do almost nothing to eliminate human misery. What it can do, he suggests, is reorder it a little and half-accidentally introduce a few new varieties. This view should not surprise any of the great South African novelist's readers. In his early-1980s masterpieces "Waiting for the Barbarians" and "Life & Times of Michael K" -- indeed, in all of his work -- political and historical forces blow through the lives of individuals like nasty weather systems, bringing with them a destruction that is all the more cruel for being impersonal. "Disgrace" is Coetzee's first book to deal explicitly with post-apartheid South Africa, and the picture it paints is a cheerless one that will comfort no one, no matter what race, nationality or viewpoint.
Last month "Disgrace" was awarded the Booker Prize, and it has undeniable echoes of "Michael K," Coetzee's 1983 Booker winner. In both books a man is broken down almost to nothing before he finds some tiny measure of redemption in his forced acceptance of the realities of life and death. But Professor David Lurie, the protagonist of "Disgrace," has farther to fall than Michael K, an unsophisticated Cape Town gardener. And the clarity David comes to at the end grows largely from his accepting an ever-increasing portion of pain. "One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet," he reflects. That sentence also describes Coetzee's notion of life in the new South Africa, where, as he portrays it, brutal tyranny has been replaced by brutal anarchy.
A middle-aged, divorced scholar of Romantic poetry, David would have undoubtedly been a pathetic figure under the old regime -- one imagines an ineffectual white liberal teaching Wordsworth to bored Afrikaners while largely ignoring the atrocities perpetrated in his name. But in the Mandela era, David has become a victim of "the great rationalization": His university has been remade into a technical college, and he teaches courses in "communication skills" that he finds nonsensical. He is such a nonentity that the prostitute he patronizes weekly -- and for whom he has begun buying gifts -- stops receiving him. He imagines her and her colleagues shuddering over him "as one shudders at a cockroach in a washbasin in the middle of the night" and wonders if he can ask his doctor to castrate him as one neuters a domestic animal.
This is the first of the many comparisons of human and animal existence in "Disgrace." Coetzee has always situated his characters in extreme situations that compel them to explore what it means to be human, and before this novel is over, David must endure both psychological abasement and physical torment. But Coetzee has never before asked so clearly what it is not to be human. Later in the novel, after David has fallen into disgrace and fled Cape Town for his daughter Lucy's remote farm, she tells him, "This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals."
If David is reduced at times almost to an animal existence and finally to becoming a caretaker for dying animals, it is the mendacity of language that leads him there. Toward the end of the story, he reflects that the language he and others use has become "tired, friable, eaten from the inside as if by termites" and that he, an expert practitioner, is also hollow, "like a fly-casing in a spiderweb." When he is hauled before an academic tribunal after a misbegotten affair with a student, he refuses to defend himself against charges of sexual harassment. At first he resists the spectacle of public "prurience and sentiment" the committee expects. When he finally blurts out an apology, members of the tribunal refuse to be satisfied, demanding to know whether it reflects his sincere feelings and comes from his heart.
Coetzee seems to be attacking the New Age tyranny of therapeutic discourse here, but David's own language doesn't seem much more trustworthy. He rashly tells his judges that his liaison with the pretty and almost totally passive Melanie transformed him, if only briefly: "I was no longer a fifty-year-old divorc� at a loose end. I became a servant of Eros." Readers may well be repelled by David's arrogance, and his conduct with Melanie has fallen only a little short of rape. But judging him is not a simple matter. He is a student of Romanticism whose unrealized ambition is to write a chamber opera about Byron's life in Italy. No matter how little of our sympathy David may command, he has a point: If he genuinely believed his passion for Melanie was the real thing, the flame he had been waiting his whole life to feel, then how could he not pursue her avidly?
There is something fundamentally cryptic and unsummarizable about "Disgrace," but I read it as an almost metaphysical journey from this Romantic variety of love to the harsher, leaner strain David eventually learns from life on and around Lucy's farm. In Coetzee's fiction the stark and beautiful South African countryside has always played a half-allegorical role as both a destructive and a regenerative environment. He certainly can't be accused of sentimentalizing rural life; shortly after David goes to live with Lucy, a stolid lesbian who, like him, seems to have been abandoned by the world, they become victims of a vicious criminal assault that may not be as random as it first appears. Their relations with Petrus, the African farmer who is their nearest neighbor, become increasingly troubled and ambiguous. David volunteers to work for Bev, a friend of Lucy's who runs the local veterinary clinic, and comes to realize that Bev's primary role, in this impoverished land, is not to heal animals but to kill them with as much love and mercy as she can summon.
In the wake of the outrages committed against him and his daughter, David still struggles with language. His angry demands for justice get no response from the overstretched police, and his attempts to confront one of the assailants -- whom Petrus is apparently protecting -- produce only stony silences and baldfaced lies. Lucy seems to understand what David cannot: that to live where she lives she must tolerate brutalization and humiliation and simply keep going. "Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept," she tells her father. "To start at ground level. With nothing ... No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity ... Like a dog." If David actually reclaims some dignity by the end of "Disgrace," it is only because he gives up everything, gives up more than a dog ever could -- his daughter, his ideas about justice and language, his dream of the opera on Byron and even the dying animals he has learned to love without reservation, without thought for himself.
salon.com |

Even before his disgrace, Professor David Lurie wasn't exactly a shining success. At age 52, he's been divorced twice and he's been demoted from professor of modern languages to adjunct professor of communications. He's a mediocre teacher specializing in Romantic poets considered obsolete when the Cape Town University College became Cape Technical University. Nevertheless, he's muddling along quite nicely. He has a weekly rendezvous with a high caliber prostitute that satisfies his sexual needs, and at least his new position still allows him to teach one poetry course a year.
But life begins to fall apart when David sees his paramour on the street one day with her two little boys. Fearing exposure, she quits her call girl life, and although he tracks her down, she rejects him. The rapport he'd felt was mere business to her. Subsequent girls sent by the "hostess service" are unsatisfying. One evening while crossing campus, he runs into Melanie Isaacs, an unremarkable young woman in his Byron class. He discovers himself "mildly smitten." They quickly become lovers. Problem is, she already has one: a young biker boy who's none too pleased about David moving in on his territory. Pressured by family and friends, Melanie reports the indiscretion and David, who refuses to apologize for his behavior---he was merely answering the call of Eros---is forced to resign.
Shunned by everyone in his small college town, he heads for his daughter's small holding. Lucy appears to enjoy her life, despite recently losing her lover, Helen. She kennels dogs, sells the flowers and vegetables she grows, and helps her African handyman become a property owner.
But just as this idyllic life begins to bore David, he sees its uglier side. Lucy convinces him to help her friend, Bev, at the local animal clinic. David, no great animal lover, finds himself face to face with the suffering of innocents---too many dogs born into a world that neither wants them nor has the means to support them. Bev's role is more executioner than veterinarian. Then, he and Lucy are attacked by three Africans, and he is helpless to prevent her being raped. Their peaceful co-existence destroyed, David struggles to understand why Lucy insists on remaining on the farm and reconcile himself to the, for him, unbelievable dynamic between her and the neighboring Africans.
Coetzee won the 1999 Booker Prize for this novel, and it's easy to see why. By chronicling the consequences of one man's abuses of and fall from power, Coetzee creates a story of both universal and regional significance. On the one hand, David is a certain type who contemptuous of others, uses his position to take what he wants and to justify the taking. But David's story is also local---he is a white South African male in a world where such men no longer hold the power they once did. He's forced to rethink his entire world at an age when he believes he's too old to change and, in fact, should have a right not to. "How are the mighty fallen!" remarks Melanie's father when he meets David. David's reply highlights the hope he's gained from this struggle: "Perhaps it does us good . . . to have a fall every now and then. As long as we don't break."
True, this story is bleak---Coetzee offers no happy quick fix for this post-apartheid South African where white men who arm themselves and build security fences are expected to get a bullet in the back eventually, and solitary white women are brutalized. And David's rise from disgrace is by no means complete. He has fallen far enough that he can no longer make a life as he did before. But the story offers a slight glimpse of self-redemption, a sense that David is not completely broken. And the tiny bit of dignity David retains implies a slight hope that if one such as David---he of the upper echelons of race and education in the old South Africa---can find meaning in life again, then perhaps the disgrace of apartheid can evolve into something better as wel


Re-reading JM Coetzee’s Disgrace
1st December 2006
Disgrace won the 1999 Booker Prize and I probably read it that year, perhaps in 2000, I don’t remember. It would certainly be among the top three novels to win that prize in the last decade.
He has not taken to Bev Shaw, a dumpy, bustling little woman with black freckles, close-cropped, wiry hair, and no neck. He does not like women who make no effort to be attractive. It is a resistance he has had to Lucy’s friends before. Nothing to be proud of; a prejudice that has settled in his mind, settled down. His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough.
Exiled to an isolated farm after being sacked from his professorial post at the University of Capetown, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, moves in with his daughter, Lucy. But shortly after his arrival the isolated farm is raided by three men who rape his daughter and try to burn Lurie alive. They shoot the dogs and eventually load up his car with all they can plunder from the house and make their getaway, leaving him and his daughter humiliated and in a state of extreme shock.
Political and historical forces shape our lives in a totally impersonal way. In this novel Coetzee deals with his vision of post-Apartheid South Africa embedded in the life of David Lurie and his friends and relations. We watch as Lurie is broken apart by the forces playing with his life and know that he will only find a grain of redemption when he gives up his illusions and begins to accept the reality of his situation.
David Lurie’s story is a journey mirrored by the transition of Mandela’s South Africa; the country moves from tyranny to anarchy, the man from a hazy and liberally romantic lifestyle to a hospice for unwanted dogs.
And all is rendered in a spare prose style that exactly matches the interiority of the main character.
The book won an unprecedented second Booker Prize for JM Coetzee in 1999, almost a decade after the release of Nelson Mandela and the beginning of the dismantling of Apartheid.
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Related Tags: apartheid, booker, coetzee, disgrace, exile, fiction, history, illusion, marginalization, modernism, novel, prose, re-reading, south africa



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10 Replies
1. Nils
Dec 1st, 2006 at 11:31 am
I’m slightly ashamed to say that I’ve still not read anything by Coetzee. I’ve wanted to for a long time, but always something has come up. Perhaps next time I drop by the library, I’ll take one home (that’s in a few days or weeks at most). I’ve been saying this for years now. Perhaps appropriate for Coetzee – read on.
I remember seeing Coetzee interviewed in the Dutch series ‘Van de schoonheid en de troost’ (’Of Beauty and Consolation’) – a wonderful set of long talks between its presenter Wim Kayzer and several of the most amazing guests.
There’s a list of them with soundbites here (don’t know how good your Dutch is these days, but most of them speak English anyway) and the Coetzee episode can be viewed in its entirety here (you’ll see ‘video’ and a small animated logo to the centre right).
To me the Coetzee episode is amazing (as are some of the others, but it’s Coetzee who’s relevant here). The way the interview goes on and on, at different locations, but never finds focus or closure, with Coetzee always postponing, thinking, wandering off in his mind. Enough said, it’s beautiful, watch it If you liked it, do let me know what you thought of it…
PS isn’t there something wrong with your dates in this post – 1990-1999?
jb says: Yes, there was something wrong with my dates, but I’ve fixed it. Thank you for bring it to my attention. Your links were interesting, at least the parts that were in English. My Dutch is not feasible, I’m afraid. I liked what he said about the task of finding himself as an animal, locating himself outside of the prison of history. But much of what he had to say in the interview was fascinating, especially as he was extremely uncomfortable with many of the questions, describing the interview form as torture because it meant he had to answer without reflection. Thanks again, it’s good to have the link, and I’m sure I’ll look at it again quite soon.
But you really should have a look at at least one of Coetzee’s books. He is something special.
Although, on a personal level, there is something monk-like about him. He abstains from tobacco, alcohol and meat, rides over vast distances on a bike, rarely smiles, and has been known to sit through an entire dinner engagement without speaking a single word.
I was at a lecture by him recently when someone’s phone went off half-way through one of Coatzee’s readings. He stopped reading and waited. He said nothing, but looked directly at the woman concerned. I (and a couple of hundred other people in the room) said a silent prayer of thanks that it wasn’t me.
2. Lee
Dec 1st, 2006 at 3:50 pm
I must listen to these, Nils, and thanks for the links. I second JB - Coetzee is absolutely amazing, and having lived in southern Africa for many years, I can only say that he captures utterly so much of its essence and (as yet) failed promise, as well as so much more about all of us. I always like to pair Disgrace with Waiting for the Barbarians, not just thematically, but because of the range of voices he’s mastered within this context, and how his voices support what else he does.
That protracted silence at a lecture: a lesson I learned in Africa!
jb says: OK, Lee, I’ve put Waiting for the Barbarians on my reading list. It’s now several hours since I watched the video and I still have the image of Coetzee squirming at the interviewer’s questions, as if he was being physically tortured.
3. Nils
Dec 1st, 2006 at 6:45 pm
Glad you liked it. I’ve watched bits of it again this afternoon and indeed ‘love’ the way he can’t seem to fit in that blatant medium that is TV – so harsh and direct. I do understand him in that.
Then I went out for some errands and… picked up Disgrace (for 10 euro) on the way home. Can’t say when I’ll get to it, because I have still so much more in queue, but at least we’re one step further: it’s here, in the house waiting to be got to.
I almost feel Coetzee-esque (if that’s a word) in my faltering attempts to tackle the man (I won’t even start about Gravity’s Rainbow)
Thanks for the post. One man’s re-reading can become another’s discovery it seems.
jb says: Listen to them bells, Nils. The whole world, it seems, wants you to put that book on the top of your pile.
4. dharini
Apr 7th, 2007 at 6:46 am
Hi…i am a huge admirer of Coetzee’s works…in the midst of “Foe”, which i believe is among his best…Coetzee is particularly remarkable with female protagonists. I wasn’t able to open the link to the audio pieces…dunno why…it’s hard to even imagine Coetzee giving an interview…does anyone here have his email id?
DP
jb says: Hi Dharini. I also read Foe a couple of years ago, but didn’t get on with it as well as some of the others. I tried the video link again just now and works fine for me. Have you got javascript enabled on your computer?
5. Impressionist
Jul 6th, 2007 at 9:58 am
The interview is an excellent piece of information for people who admire John Coetzee. Disgrace was the first Coetzee book that I read; it raised a lot of questions about the man who had written it. So I started finding out all that was said by Coetzee; through interviews etc. Sadly there wasn’t much; the recluse that John is he hardly gives any interviews; and his explanation on the interview format being “incompatible” with him is fairly understandable as he “likes to have certain perfection in his responses”. Apart from the Dutch TV interview; which I guess is the best resource of information I have on Coetzee; there is another interesting interview and reading from Youth here. http://www.lannan.org/lf/rc/event/j-m-coetzee/
Despite the fact that John is a recluse and its difficult to extract much from him about his own life and its influence on his works; I guess if any one is interested in knowing about him, his books are the best resources. From Boyhood to Youth to Disgrace to Elizabeth Costello and now Inner Workings. I guess all of these draw heavily upon Coetzee’s own life. I have read only Youth, Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello; and I find that a lot of information about the man’s life and mind is available from there.
In a way I identify with Coetzee to a great sense; my perception is that he is a very confused man; understandably so as he is a perfectionist and instead of accepting a theory or a philosophy which can not prove itself to him; he prefers to remain confused. He doesn’t attempt to preach and provide answers in his works, as probably he understands that there are no write answers. His life seems to have been a continuous struggle with himself more than with anyone else. The world by and large does not seem to bother him after he reached a certain age. I guess, even if he does not dislike human beings; he does not have agreat amount of love for them either. This despite the fact that he is so sensitive to and aware of the human suffering. To my mind he expects a certain level of dignity for every human being irrespective of their backgrounds and political / ideological allegiences.
I guess he is recluse because he understands the futility of it all; futility of fame; because of the changes it may bring into him. There is something that this man knows and has realized which we all are not aware of as yet.
If I get to speak with him some day; what a conversation it would be!!
6. Impressionist
Jul 6th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Dharini,
i hope you have been able to access the links by now. I have downloaded version of the interview (which i was able to do after weeks of R&D). the file is pretty bulky in Real format (100+ MB). in 3gp format its around 10 MB or less. so if you can’t get to see the interview; let me know’ we can find a way to share the video.
Can somebody tell me a little about John’s latest “Inner Workings”. the book is pretty costly here in India, and i was wondering how it is…
PS - In the last post it should have been “there are no right answers” instead of “there are no write answers”.
Apologies for the same.
7. Mary McGArvey
Jul 31st, 2007 at 4:43 pm
I picked up this book “Disgrace” while housesitting for a 50′ish bachelor in California. What an excellent and spare writer this South African is! However, what struck me as a member of a very multicultural area of my own, the Bay Area of San Francisco, is the complete lack of backbone in this character, David Lurie. In the end, he has no real guts to stand up for himself, to fight for his daughter, to deal with ex-wives or colleagues with any real gumption. In this regard, I see the decline of South Africa, the giving in to chaos, anarchy, black-on-white raping and violence, destruction of the white farmers, etc. as embodied in this seemingly diffident professor. Educated man? Yes! Backbone, guts, common sense, emotional maturity, no!
SO his decline into his own despair, through volunteer work with dogs to be put down, his deigning to sleep with a woman he finds unattractive (though years younger than him…), I find the typical indulgence of an individual who has in his youth had great arrogance, a belief in his own superiority, vanity, intolerance regarding women. Only in his 50’s when no one looks at him anymore, when no woman turns her head and returns his smiles, when his students don’t listen and look through him, when his wives have left him and even his “ho” rejects him, then he begins a journey of anguish, as the white people of South Africa are now doing.
On the other hand, this story is so well written, such a metaphor for many other parts of life and parts of the world undergoing cultural decline, that anyone could enjoy reading it.
I didn’t think that 52 is considered old, but perhaps for men in South Africa, if 30 is old in a woman, then 52 is ancient in a man. I have never been there, but in some ways it sounds stuck in a timewarp, mentally, especially as regards women. His poor daughter doesn’t even try to fight back, or leave the farm, just accepts that she will have biracial children as a third wife of a former dogman! She has to give up the land as a DOWRY! She is allowed to “keep the house”! And the fact that she is lesbian, did not desire to sleep with any man, is ironic: does it represent the old South Africa, which wanted nothing really to do with the nonwhites, esp. blacks, getting forcibly raped by them, one even wrong in the head, so that the country is forced to submit to a new race’s rule!? Violence and rape will win Africa for the blacks, yippiee!
Mary
8. Hicham
Sep 13th, 2007 at 3:43 am
Lurie is a tired man. Self indulgent. One morning, he wakes up and realized abruptly that he is a man of the past. What has he done? What has he written? Since then he pursues his disgrace and when he meets it through Melanie he welcomes it like a grace. He seeks to meet Melanie’s father to thank him for the disgrace he brought him. Whithout which no redemption and without redemption, no creation, no operas, no writings.
The scenes in his daughter’s farm, the animal hospice, the black and white conflict are not central. They just operate as a catalyst.
Hicham.
9. alanna
Apr 23rd, 2008 at 4:00 am
i have just read disgrace, finally. in 2008. having been married to a brown south african man from cape town for past 3 years, i really felt i ought to!!! i loved it and agree with the learned comments above
(i am a white middle class over-educated australian, who speaks 5 languages but not dutch)
i saw coetzee here in sydney not long after he emigrated to australia (lives in adelaide hills i believe - full of german wine-growers, not unlike stellenbosch and paarl i imagine, in bygone years).
he did not read anything from his novels, but rather an essay he’d written on a children’s story (i forget which - maybe wind in the willows or alice in wonderland). he was just as weird as you guys described. not broken, but restrained.
i am now going to read his earlier books - our little local library has absolutely everything of his.
it helps now to be married to a south african - to understand bits of afrikaans slang and refs to cape town suburbs. but mostly to understand the whole mess that is “legacy of apartheid”.
the bride price/dowry thing - that is universal in black africa (not just in south africa), well-known i thought.
But even the most privileged white south africans (who moved to Sydney 15 years ago) are morally and socially at my grandparents’ level. That is, they have been stuck in a time warp since 1930s. I mean they are pre everything, certainly
pre-feminism. The flipside is, of course, that they are not confused - men known what men are supposed to do, women the same, and chidlren are allowed a childhood, unlike here in the west where 5 year old girls now dress like paris hilton. Women do not feel like they are missing anything, they “know their place”.
If I were a lesbian however I would not live there except for the mardi gras thing in Cape Town - it rivals ours here, I hear.
anyway, that’s my 2 cents’ worth!
jb says: Hi Alanna. Good to hear from you and good, also, that you enjoyed the book. It is something special. Why do I think your post is going to be a little controversial?
The Moment Before the Gun Went Off
In “The Moment Before the Gun Went Off,” Nadine Gordimer presents readers
with a poignant vignette of South African apartheid. Gordimer is not out to
blame, an instinctive tendency that would only widen the already gaping
black- white schism. In “The Moment,” Gordimer means to link the two races
as victims of the injustices of apartheid, and possibly to contribute to the
eradication of a segregationist mindset and to the reconciliation of blacks and
whites. Her vehicle is Marais Van der Vyver’s “twenty-year old farmhand,”
Lucas. In the story, Van der Vyver has taken particular interest in this “black
boy,” teaching him tractor maintenance and taking him hunting. As usual,
Lucas rode in the bed of the pickup, scouring the African grasses for game,
while Van der Vyver drove. Vand de Vyber's gun discharges and renders Lucas
a victim of freak accident, negligence, and ultimately apartheid.

In Gordimer’s South Africa, apartheid has become more than legislation; it
has become a mentality that segregates and prejudges. Lucas and Van der
Vyver were separated by more than the rear window of the truck. The narrator
is an unmistakable apartheid-sympathizer. He drops stereotypes carelessly, -
always commenting on how blacks raise their children, on how blacks waste
their money on funerals, and on “their” perceived short-comings and
idiosyncrasies in general. Lucas is not a boy; he is a “black boy.” The narrator,
wide-eyed with disbelief, remarks that “blacks can sit and drink in white
hotels” and that “blacks can sleep with whites.” These are unthinkable
liberties in the mind of the white apartheid-advocate. By speaking from the
perspective of an apartheid supporter, Gordimer manages to storm the
apartheid fortress from within, and in the process, seizes a brilliant sense of
irony and seemingly unquestionable credibility for herself. Gordimer sounds
her loudest peal of irony in the last sentence: Lucas is Van der Vyver’s son,
and therefore, both white and black. Just as Van de Vyver has failed to
acknowledge his son, the white community has refused to acknowledge the
culture of discrimination and oppression they have been supporting.
However, “the young black callously shot through the negligence of the white
man” is not only the farmer’s son; he is a symbol. Lucas, as the son of Van
der Vyver and one of his farm workers, is the intersection of the black and
white divisions. Apartheid has extinguished Lucas’ life, along with black
dignity and white moral integrity. Gordimer has slid her keystone into place
and has constructed a South Africa divided, confused, and victimized by
apartheid.
More reviews about the The Moment Before the Gun Went Off
Bibliography
The Moment Before the Gun Went Off by Nadine Gordimer



A MAN OF THE PEOPLE.(1966)CHINUA ACHEBE. A man of the people is a captivating novel that guarantees you an entertaining and breath taking time as you continue reading page by page. Chinua Achebe has used very creatively the political history of his country Nigeria to form the basis of this book, A man of the people captures the indiscretions of African leaders and their un level playing field when it comes to political issues. The book also captures the ills of the ruling class represented by Chief Nanga and his cronies in power, the likes of Chief Koko.

A man of the people starts with the now famous lines among literature students in Africa, “No one can deny that Chief the Honorable M.A. Nanga, M.P., was the most approachable politician in the country…” The book is written using the I narrator perspective and therefore, the above lines are said by Odili Samalu. Odili of course comes out strongly as being a major character in the text and the main rival of Chief Nanga. The book starts out at a function at the Anata Grammar School where Odili teaches and the functions chief guest is none other than Chief Nanga. He was due to address the staff and the students at the schools’ Assembly Hall. The villagers of course not being able to keep away from such an important visit by the area Member of Parliament thronged the Assembly Hall to capacity. In fact the narrator tells us that the Assembly hall must have carried more than thrice its capacity.
The people went out of their way to welcome the politician. We are told various dancing groups were performing at different points in the school compound as they awaited the arrival of the chief guest, Chief Nanga.
Chief Nanga was able to recognize his favorite pupil sixteen years back when he used to teach in standard three, Odili was over whelmed at Chief Nangas’ good memory. Nanga invited Odili to his home in Bori, the Capital.
Odili disagreed with Chief Nanga after he Chief Nanga shamelessly slept with Odilis’ Girlfriend Elsie in his matrimonial home. Odili could not stomach this insult to his manhood and he had a verbal spurt with Chief Nanga which led to him leaving his home and went to stay with his friend Maxwell Kulamo a lawyer.
This was the beginning of the bitter rivalry between Odili and Nanga. Maxwell Kulamo known as “Coolmax” by his friends back at the Grammar School consoled Odili and together with other of his friends formed a party called Common People’s Convention. (The C.P.C).
Maxwell was to run against Chief Koko in the next Election and Odili readily accepted to join the party and run against Chief Nanga. They went ahead to implement the plans and went the full way to the elections. However, it was not a simple affair for them as the incumbents used all that was available to their disposal to stop this new crop of politicians from humiliating them in the Elections.
Chief Nanga for example planted crude weapons on Odilis car and he was put under arrest for possession of dangerous arms. Nanga made sure that Odili naver had a chance to sign his nomination papers.
Maxwell Kulamo was killed in Abaga by Chief Koko. He was ran over by one his jeeps when alighting from his vehicle. Eunice, Max’s Girlfriend, pulled out a pistol immediately and fired two bullets into Chief Koko’s chest as revenge for felling her boyfriend.

Chinua Achebe has described what African politics is explicitly in this book and I would recommend it to any one for reading and for any one who wishes to have an insight of African dirty Political gimmicks Finnaly I end this Abstract with Odili’s final words in he book; “I say you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest- without asking to be paid.”


Role of media both print and radio in “A Man of the People”
In A Man of the People Chief Nanga, is referred to by the narrator Odili, as a man of the people, and the most approachable politician in the West Africa. Role of media should be stand as an intermediately between the government and the common people but it is portryed by Achebe as an evil side of media in A Man of the People. We know each media vehicle has a significance role to play. If print generates awareness and disseminates information, radio is a vehicle to build the brand with its emotional appeal. But what we see in A Man of the People? We see media is a representative of government or we can say media are the mouth speech of government of West Africa in A Man of the people. They have no connection with common people even with the opposition. In A Man of the People we observed two kinds of media; they are the mouth speech of government. Print media, like The Daily Chronicle is an official organ of the P.O.P (People’s Organization Party) and the broadcasts media like African national radio stations main job is broadcasted government’s speech.

Print media plays very significant role in the novel A Man of the People. Achebe casts a critical eye on African politics and as well as media. Achebe shows the switching of power between the old and new styles of politicians and how the old bush politician, Chief Nanga, is becoming more and greedier as he learns the political system. He is the one of the Member of Parliament. The government is more powerful and corrupted and they know how to handle general people. They use media as a representative of government. It is really happened in third world country. All media are bound to government because government has power. Any time they can close media house. It is the big threat for media. Some time government is the big investiture for circulation or broadcasting. That is why, they are bound to make fake news that increase government image. For example, “The Daily Chronicle, an official organ of the P.O.P had pointed out in an editional that the Miscreant Gang, as the dismissed ministers were now called, were all university people and highly educated professional men.” News papers are not independent at West Africa. News paper are carried the prime Minister or Government version of the story. They can it easily because of the common men are far away from the “intellectual!” Dr Makinde the ex- Minister of Finance as he got up to speak tell, calm, sorrowful and superior. It was a most unedifying spectacle. He is called “Traitor”, “Coward”, and “Doctor of Fork your Mother” by common people. But the next morning the editor of the Daily Chronicle published news that was opposite of Dr. Makinde’s speech. Is says “a brilliant economist whose reputation was universally acclaimed in Europe”. The Daily Matchet also play same role. Another thing is important that media are not only representative of Government but also underestimate the oppositions. They have no social responsibility. They do not think about common people even they have no relation with them because of uneducated and unawareness society. It is really happening in Africa as well as third world country. Media have no role for repetitive society. They can not write down a single word without government’s authorization.

Radio also the mouth speaker of government in A Man of the People. Radio is censored by the government. It can not any play any role independently. It is far away from the common people. The government does not want the common people know true information. We know as a human being it is right to know all true information. But the real picture is totally opposite. Radio’s have no connection with common people. Oppositions are threatened by the radio but most of the time they represent there is no opposition only the government. For example Nanga says that only the powerful party is P.O.P. The government does not want the common people to hare information regarding the pipes. Hezekiah Samaluis a chairman of P.O.P. Many pipes are approved by P.O.P for a villager. It is forecasted by radio. On the other hand, when Samalu distributes it two other villages for his anti parties activities. This news does not forecast through radio because of the image of P.O.P. One day Odili is listening radio for news but he is not able to hare any news without govern activities. It is controlled by P.O.P

Everyone knows information is a form of power. The Third World countries now know this more than ever. That is why they are calling for the establishment of a new international order of information. They feel this is just as urgent as the establishment of a new international economic order. In A Man of the People we see media is like a doll of government that has no existent without other. They have no activities without government. They are bound to government because of existing.

Odili Samalu
Odili Samalu is a narrator and protagonist of A Man of the People, odili is native of Urua village, where his father Hezekiah is a wealthy man who was a district interpreter and now head of the local chapter of the People’s Organization Party (POP). Odili has graduated from the Anata Grammer School, where he is Nanga’s Favorite student and is a disaffected member of the student’s branch of POP. Odili, the narrator, represents the new intellectual generation. Odili is a kind of man who most of the times narrate the entire situation that he observes but does not take any kind of inatiative aginst that insident. We can compear him with the main character in Gallivar Travels by Jonathon Swift who always described most of the stories but did not take any kind of action against that particular insident; he took action against any particular situation whent that harms him. Odili did the same when his girl friend was taken away from you by Chief Nanga.

Chief Nanga
In A Man of the People, Chief Nanga, is referred to by the narrator, Odili, as a man of the people, and the most approachable politician in the country. He is the minister of culture and his speeches to the public represent everything that a politician should do and be. But as Odili tells the story, it becomes clear that Chief Nanga does not practice what he preaches. The money that is supposed to go towards helping his community he uses instead to build four-story buildings, which he rents out for his own profit. Chief Nanga is supposed to be standing up for the traditions and beliefs of the pre-colonial African culture by defending the common man and opposing the European-oriented post-colonial intellectuals. However, in A Man of the People Achebe focuses more on the politics of West African communities. Achebe shows the switching of power between the old and new styles of politicians and how the old style bush politician, Chief Nanga, is becoming more and more greedy as he learns the political system. Chief Nanga learns to be greedy and learns how to win elections through the corrupt system of politics he was against in the first place. The important thing for Chief Nanga is that the people trust him. He relates to them more, because he considers himself closer to the common man and far away from the intellectual, who represents a more European style of living and thinking. By representing his country after colonialism he has the incentive to stay as far away from the European style of life and politics as possible.
Odili’s Father
His father name is Hezekiah. He is a wealthy man who was a district interpreter and now head of the local chairman of the People’s Organization Party (POP). He is a perfect example of typical African man. He does not want to eccept any thing from the modern or developing world. He believes that nobody can brak the old form of rules and cannot build any thing new out of old rulers. He represents the typical African culture; he believes in poligamy, and he also married severel times and careless about his family and children. He proves that in Africa most of the people do not aware about the political situation and corruption in politics.