Abstract
Kai Easton
Scandalous Fictions: Coetzee's Disgrace
Five years after its publication and ten years into democracy, the scandal of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) is still as great as its success. Winning the Booker Prize that year, it was denounced in an April 2000 submission by the ANC to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) as part of the racism and the media inquiry. The report accuses Coetzee of ‘ making the point' that
… five years after liberation white South African society continues to believe in a particular stereotype of the African which defines the latter as immoral and amoral, a savage, violent, disrespectful of private property, incapable of refinement through education and driven by … dark satanic impulses' (2000: 124).
What does not appear to have been asked in any of the coverage so far is why was Disgrace , a fiction , selected for an inquiry on racism and the media ? How does the report – which confuses Coetzee with his character David Lurie, and other characters and events with real life – contribute to the reputation of this millennial novel, and how does the scandal in Disgrace become the scandal of Disgrace ?
This landmark text has only a very short history, but its influence in the public sphere has already been significant. ‘Is this the right image of our nation?' asked the esteemed professor of literature and Director-General under Mandela, Jakes Gerwel, in an article for the Afrikaans weekly Rapport . ‘Feeding national paranoia?' was the headline of another article, questioning Coetzee's fictional portrayal of gender and race (and here one must consider the implications of his silencing of the rape and crime in the novel; neither are actually depicted, neither of them graphically represented in any way).
The notoriety of the book and Coetzee's recent Nobel Prize for Literature has certainly increased his profile, but it has also reignited the local debate. That it is in tension with the novel's international image is perfectly encapsulated in a cartoon published in the national press shortly after the award. The first box (‘Then') features an ANC politician holding a copy of the novel with the caption: ‘This unpatriotic book is a disgrace to South Africa !' Alongside this (‘Now'), the same picture is enhanced with a sticker on the jacket cover of Disgrace (‘By Nobel Prize Winner') and the caption: ‘We salute our latest Nobel Laureate and bask with him in the glory radiating from this recognition' – words straight out of President Mbeki's statement congratulating Coetzee.
What, after all, is scandalous about Disgrace ? What else is the book about ? Why does the ‘shocking' material obscure its complex storyline, its engagement with history, ethics, and the Romantics? And what might have been Coetzee's motive for inserting the topical and ‘shocking'? Has the lifting of the bans pronounced by the Publications Control Board during apartheid – the ‘undesirable' publications which Coetzee himself has written about in his collection of essays, Giving Offense (1996) – created space for a democratic reading of Disgrace , or has the banning and censorship of the past simply been replaced by something else? (In this regard it is certainly worth noting too that the novel has been chosen as a set text on the South African Independent Schools Board Matric examination – the choice is between Disgrace and D. H. Lawrence's Sons & Lovers ).
At a time of transformation, it would seem that the transgression of Disgrace is its very staging of realism – violence in the new South Africa, post-1994, post-TRC – combined with a more extreme fictional suggestion for serious moral responsibility: Lucy's choice to ‘pay for history', to keep the baby fathered by one of her rapists and to give her land – and her hand – to her black neighbour Petrus. (This dramatic and controversial conclusion has even led to a discussion of the novel in Parliament.)
What are the repercussions of such debates on ideas of authorship and textuality? If readers have appropriated Coetzee as a public figure (his recent emigration to Australia has been read as in some way connected to his ‘bleak' vision of the new South Africa in Disgrace ), the scandal may well be that the reception of his novel simply confirms the questions that it raises.