Disgrace (Paperback)

David Lurie is a professor of "Communications" at a Cape Town university. His specialty is Romantic poets, in particular Byron. At age 52, twice divorced and finding gratification, if not fulfillment, in orchestrated liaisons with prostitutes, Lurie is a trivial version of the Byronic hero he studies. Despite his professorship, Lurie, by his own admission, is no teacher. He prefers the tag "scholar." He is in fact a manipulator, a controller.

One evening he has a chance encounter with one of his students, a 20 year-old co-ed named Melanie. He invites her for dinner and seduces her. Melanie is quickly repulsed by the idea of romance with a man more than twice her age. Lurie, though, pursues her with what he perceives to be heroic ardor. Melanie soon falls into depression. Her tatooed, goateed boyfriend-another Byronic cartoon-and her fundamentalist father--another teacher by profession, controller by action--confront Lurie and urge Melanie to file harassment charges against him. In an act of deluded Romantic martyrdom, Lurie confesses without apology to the affair, practically daring university authorities to dismiss him from his post. They oblige.

He finds refuge at his daughter Lucy's farm in the rural East Cape. There he strongly resists adaptation to country life. The dirt, the smells, the absence of stylized beauty and decorous behavior disgust him. He wrongly fears for his daughter's happiness and rightly, as it turns out, for her safety. He mistrusts and resents her African tenant, Petrus, a purely natural force with his two wives (one who is half his age-see Melanie) and inexorable ambition to gain sway over the white woman he must labor for. Lurie is even vexed by the most heartfelt of Lucy's emotions, her simple love of animals and her warm regard for the physically repugnant Bev Shaw, an amateur veterinarian ironically qualified only to perform euthanasia on the stray and discarded pets she volunteers to take in and nurture.

In a story replete with irony, perhaps the greatest is Lurie's repulsion at the realities of the Romantic ideal he so ardently embraces. The Romantics believed that grace could only be attained in nature, the more primitive the better. Lurie, against his own developed taste, encounters, both by horrible chance and by engineered design, nature's nasty, brutish but ultimately regenerative forces. Along the way, his long-held notions of beauty, art and love ebb, inflate, distort and evolve, until Lurie emerges quite literally) from the ashes, re-formed: no longer teacher, but learner: no longer manipulative, but accepting; no longer taking, but giving.

To fully appreciate this book, I found myself charting the inter-woven relationships of Lurie and Melanie, Lurie and Lucy, Lucy and Petrus, Lucy and Bev, Lurie and Bev, Lurie and Byron, Byron and his mistress Teresa. Three general kinds of love in widely varied shades dominate: Romantic love; parental love; and "natural", "elemental" love. Duality abounds: art and artifice; scholarship and reality; brutality and tenderness; torment and succor. This is a book so dense with ideas that I had to write a review just to organize my thoughts and try to appreciate its scope. A true modern masterpiece, and the best Booker winner I have ever read (apologies to Salman Rushdie, Keri Hulme and Kashuo Ishiguro).

For the names are full of significance. David's last name, Lurie, and that of the student he becomes involved with, Isaacs, together allude to the 16th century kabbalist, Isaac Luria. The Lurianic kabbalah explores the mystical connections of language, and David Lurie's conception of language emphasizes this mystical element. He is a professor of "Communications", but he rejects the notion that language had its origins in the need to communicate. He sees language as originating in music and sees as its function the filling of the human soul. One can think of language as "enchantment" or "incantation" to capture this connection to music. In a striking passage, Lurie reflects that he would like to like to hear the story of Petrus, the African farmer who helps run his daughter's farm, but not in English. I expected Lurie to reason that English was the language of the colonialist, but that isn't where he is headed. Lurie sees English as a dead language, where the words have lost their mystical power, and can no longer give voice to spiritual truth.

In the Lurianic kabbalah, there is a notion of a flawed Creation, in which the divine light was placed in vessels which were unable to contain it, and the vessels shattered. This motif is picked up in the scene from the play in which Melanie Isaacs (the student who becomes involved with Lurie) appears. In this scene, Melanie comes on stage as a job applicant in a beauty parlor, and promptly manages to short the lamps, causing a terrific blast of light, and then plunging the theater into darkness.

The title "Disgrace" can be understood as an absence of grace. The word "grace" appears three times in the novel, each time in a context which indicates the absence of grace. It is first used to refer to a dying dog who is not given a "coup de grace"; there is no mercy, there is no grace. "Grace" appears next in a conversation between David and his ex-wife, Rosalind, who asks about the companion of Lurie's daughter. The companion is named "Helen", but Rosalind gets it wrong and calls her "Grace". It is the sort of slip which is so meaningless that it must mean something, otherwise Coetzee wouldn't have stuck it in. And here it clearly refers to the absence of Grace in the life of David's daughter. The final time that grace is used is with respect to a dog in Bev Shaw's animal shelter; it's "period of grace" is about to expire, and it will be put to death. Once again, "grace" is only used to refer to its absence.

One central idea of the Lurianic kabbalah is that in order to create the world, God had to "make space" for creation by contracting. There is a reflection of this process, by which a human must contract the ego in order to make room for God. In each of the stages that Lurie goes through in this novel, from losing his job, losing his possessions, losing his sense of himself as a protector and a creator, he experiences a process of contraction. This appears to be a disgrace ("How the mighty have fallen," says Melanie's father to David, quoting King David), but in fact it is a precondition for making David alive to the possibilities of spiritual regeneration. So that the final scene of the book, when David's contraction of the self becomes complete, comes through as final moment of grace.

"Disgrace" tells the story of David Lurie, a 52 year old English professor with literally nothing going for him - His teaching is uninspired, his scholarly output is uninteresting, his department has been gradually phased out, and he gratifies his baser urges once a week with the same prostitute. Spotting this prostitute, Soraya, out one day with her children, David himself is spotted, and his comfortable, prosaic routine is shattered. He begins an affair with Melanie, a student in his Romanticism course. Brought up on charges of sexual impropriety, David resigns from his university position, and moves to the hinterlands to live with his daughter Lucy, a homesteading farmer and animal caregiver. The remainder of the novel follows David's attempts to put some semblance of a life together.

David's interactions with others frame his post-teaching life. David's problems stem from his high, even standoffish self-regard as an intelligent man, closed off from mainstream society and its traditional difficulties. The fraught socio-economic relationship between Lucy and her ambitious neighbour, Petrus, is especially trying in the aftermath of South African Apartheid. Animals play a large part in David's reacculturation - Lucy and her friend, Bev Shaw, are involved in amateur doctoring and anaesthetizing sick animals - David is forced to consider in a profound way the relationship and likenesses between humans and beasts in the modern age. On the animal tip, David's anxieties also involve human sexuality - in the aftermath of his school scandal and his uncertainties surrounding his daughter and his genetic legacy, David must rethink sex, love, and life.

Scholastically, "Disgrace" is informed heavily by David's professional interest in Romantic Era poetry. His personal interest in writing a chamber opera on Byron and various telling references to and citations of Wordsworth throughout the novel provide a literary framework for the novel. It suggests that David's quest for renewal both begins in and must escape his 18th and 19th century studies in order to reconcile himself to the changing modern world.

"Disgrace" is a novel I could keep talking and talking about. When I first finished reading it, I had an extremely unusual reaction. It may be pretentious to say, but I feel that this is the kind of novel that carries within it so many important issues and universal themes, that it may well eventually take a place in literary history occupied by the likes of "The Great Gatsby," one of those novels that our children and their children will be reading and studying well into the future. In short, Coetzee's "Disgrace" is an essential novel.