Abstract
M. Neelika Jayawardane
“South Africa and The Nobel Laureate: The Problematics of Staged Contrition, Forgiveness and the Limits of Reconciliation in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace ”
How comfortable can the new South Africa be with a protagonist such as David Lurie? If the nation under reconstruction defines itself as a place in which storytelling continues to unveil the silences created by the history of aparthied, a position championed by the Truth Commission, where do Coetzee's wary, unruly, and ambiguous protagonists fit within the matrix of the new national myth of reconcilliation? These questions point towards a larger anxiety in the nation, signalled, perhaps most prominantly, by President Thabo Mbeki's disapproval of Coetzee's novel, Disgrace . In this novel, published in the aftermath of the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission, Coetzee explores the limits of absolution through remorse, the promise of forgiveness, the im/possiblitites for reconcilliation through public confessional, and the problematic viability of constructing a public stage on which guilt may or may not be determined, and then purged though coersion and imposition of social control. Through exploring these issues within a private citizen's life, Coetzee comments on the same conflicts presented on the national arena: on the limits of truth, remorse, fogiveness, and reconcilliation. The new national myths created around the Truth Commisssion imply that in order for the nation/individual to become “whole” once more, perpertrators of crimes should only have to unburden the collective self of all knowledge of violations; however, perpertrators do not have to feel remorse. It is the so-called “victim” who can bestow full humanity back to the violator through forgiveness, thus allowing the violated to restore the self back to a whole entity without depending on the violator: this belief allows a nation, heavy with the burden of silences and unremorseful violators to fill the gaps as it attempts to present the possibility of a reconstructed whole. But Coetzee's protagonist, Lurie, hardly has the space to redeem the self: Lurie dismissal from a position of authority is spectacular, public, and symbolically ensures that his understanding of how the world works – his position as a man, as a South African of European ancestry, as a definer of the boundaries of language and meaning in his world – is no longer welcome in the new South Africa. A new order has moved in, and it is as unbending and marked by self-serving morality as the old order. No one forgives satisfyingly, but neither is there any satisfying act of contrition from Lurie, even at the moment that he kneels at the feet of the provincial family whose lives he has disrupted. What does all this mean for South Africa ? If a community's sense of unity is achieved through purging of sin - by symbolic acts such as actual scapegoating (to which Lurie refers), or by attaching perceived sins upon an actual human being and then expelling him from “civilisation” - what does this say about creating spaces for ambiguity within a new nation's desires for a unified society? Even if Coetzee's protagonist finds a means of living with ambivalance towards his own private transgressions, can South Africa , too, live with a similar ambivalance?