Re: _Disgrace_ by J. M. Coetzee


smw wrote:

> Oh how boring. I've made it clear that I consider any reading that
> _denies_ that race and gender are important in this book the work of
> ideological nincompoopery. Your own reading makes it clear how much you
> think gender matters.

this is growing tiresome beyond all belief, but now that you have the
big guns of literacy coming out on your side, i'll have to bow out
gracelessly...

the novel is about a _man_, not gender... to you that is a false
distinction; to me it isn't...
the man the novel is about is white... and black guys rape his
daughter... so to you, that means the novel is about race; to me, it's
a part of the setting, which is contemporary south africa...

> > my response to that stock formula as a substitute for thinking and
> > reading
>
> Naming two themes amongst a dozen others isn't "a formula." And denying
> the presence of race and gender in this book isn't "thinking," it's a
> jerking knee that believes itself immune to the hammer on the nerve.

and as i've already said, you could list endless "themes" for this
novel; how you've arrived at 14, i'll never know, and frankly don't
want to... insisting that the novel is about race and gender, as i've
said, is tiresome, cliched and requires as much imagination as it would
to call bush a bad guy...

> > is that it smacks of grad school circa 1985 and deserves
> > euthanasia even more than the
> > doggies-who-stand-for-white-liberal-males...
>
> Yeah, I say let's ban talk of race and sex altogether, and if they sneak
> into a novel, there's always that white-out of the mind.

your reading of race and gender into this book, as if these were what
the novel is about (among twelve other themes... i remember) leads you
to a spurious reading of the doggie euthanansia that would probably be
considered clever if a first or second year eng-lit student put it in a
term paper: the extinction of the white male liberal... an allegory...
you have of course provided nothing from the text itself to show us
where coetzee nudges us to see it this way, so i'll provide something
from his most recent novel to support my reading of the doggies:

"They leave it at that, he and Marijana, their exchange of particulars.
But her question echoes in his mind. 'Who is going to take care of
you?' The more he stares at the words 'take care of', the more
inscrutable they seem. He remembers a dog they had when he was a child
in Lourdes, lying in its basket in the last stages of distemper,
whimpering without cease, its muzzle hot and dry, its limbs jerking.
'Bon, je m'en occupe,' his father said at a certain point, and picked
up the dog, basket and all, and walkd out of the house. Five minutes
later, from the woods, he heard the flat report of a shotgun, and that
was that, he never saw the dog again. 'Je m'en occupe': I'll take
charge of it; I'll take care of it; I'll do what has to be done. That
kind of caring, with a shotgun, was certainly not what Marijana had in
mind. Nevertheless, it lay englobed in the phrase, waiting to leak out.
If so, what of his reply: 'I'll take care of myself'? What did his
words mean, objectively? Did the taking care, the caretaking he spoke
of extend to donning his best suit and swallowing down his cache of
pills, two at a time, with a glass of hot milk, and lying down with his
hand folded across his breast?" _Slow Man_ pps. 43-4

this instance of recallled doggie euthanasia as an instance of caring,
with its subtle ambiguities, revisits the final movements in
_Disgrace_... the whole book, which i'm sorry to say is "all about
LOVE", especially eros and caritas and their conflicting interactions,
is a clear development from _Disgrace_...

i don't experience myself as a gender: i'm a guy, a man, whatever, but
never a gender... i can only experience my whiteness by applying
abstract analyses to my daily life, but i'm not all that into it, so i
don't really experience myself as a race or having race either...

i do however experience varieties of love in my life, from morning
tent-poles to pain at the sight of suffering and clumsy desire to do
something about it... for me these are not abstractions, in the way
that race and gender are, especially in the PC world where prating on
about race and gender and post-colonial this and that is, as i have
said, a substitute for literacy, sensitivity and thought...

my feeling from reading his books is that coetzee is more in my
ballpark than yours... but hey, who really cares?

one of the things that makes me admire _Disgrace_ so much is the fact
that the brutal rape of the white woman by the black men is _NOT_
treated with this patina of "post-colonial race and gender in sugar
frosted flakes advertising: tony the tiger as colonial omega man"... it
is presented frankly as something that happens in south africa these
days, something that illuminates Lurie in his relationship to his
daughter and himself as a caring individual, and something that
provokes him to reflection about himself, not race and gender and the
end of liberalism in south africa...

your approach trivializes the novel, and ignores the courage it takes
for coetzee to present the rapes in the way he does, a middle finger
rigidly up in the faces of those who'd call Lurie before a tribunal for
his "seduction" of Melanie (melanyi, the dark one, as Lurie imagines
her, signalling again that the novel does not equate dark skin with
race necessarily) and those who'd insist that the fact that these
country boys angrily rape a white woman out of race hatred and because
they can must be understood as an instance of post-colonial race
relations, rather than part of human reality...

michael

.

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