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J.M. Coetzee Interview on Writers & Company

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I had to read this book for class and I surprisingly liked it, though 90% of my classmates did not like it, so yeah. **Trigger warning! If rape is something that you're not okay with being a common point throughout a novel, this isn't for you.

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22. J.M. Coetzee, The Historical, and The Literary

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22. J.M. Coetzee, The Historical, and The Literary

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J.M. Coetzee, The Historical, and The Literary

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Dominick LaCapra discusses the work of J. M. Coetzee, a renowned novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize. He focuses on two of Coetzee's most important works: Elizabeth Costello and Disgrace.

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Lurie pursues his relationship with the young Melanie-whom he describes as having hips "as slim as a twelve-year-old's"-obsessively and narcissistically, ignoring, on one occasion, her wish not to have sex. When Melanie and her father lodge a complaint against him, Lurie is brought before an academic committee where he admits he is guilty of all the charges but refuses to express any repentance for his acts.

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Disgrace study guide contains a biography of J. M. Coetzee, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee :: A Literature Break

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Nath Jones reads a veterinarian office scene from Disgrace.

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18. Gareth's answers (South African 2014-15 TA)

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18. Gareth's answers (South African 2014-15 TA)

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A few articles about JM Coetzee and his winning of the Nobel Prize.

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Nobelprize.org, The Official Web Site of the Nobel Prize

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Historical background of South Africa and the events building up towards the context of Disgrace.

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Home Page | South African History Online

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The Augusta Chronicle: Local & World News, Sports & Entertainment in Augusta, GA

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South Africa (seemap) is a country blessed with an abundance of natural resources including fertile farmlands and unique mineral resources. South African mines are world leaders in the production of diamonds and gold as well as strategic metals such as platinum. The climate is mild, reportedly resembling the San Francisco bay area weather more than anywhere in the world.
South Africa was colonized by the English and Dutch in the seventeenth century. English domination of the Dutch descendents (known as Boers or Afrikaners) resulted in the Dutch establishing the new colonies of Orange Free State and Transvaal. The discovery of diamonds in these lands around 1900 resulted in an English invasion which sparked the Boer War. Following independence from England, an uneasy power-sharing between the two groups held sway until the 1940's, when the Afrikaner National Party was able to gain a strong majority. Strategists in the National Party invented apartheid as a means to cement their control over the economic and social system. Initially, aim of the apartheid was to maintain white domination while extending racial separation. Starting in the 60's, a plan of ``Grand Apartheid'' was executed, emphasizing territorial separation and police repression.

With the enactment of apartheid laws in 1948, racial discrimination was institutionalized. Race laws touched every aspect of social life, including a prohibition of marriage between non-whites and whites, and the sanctioning of ``white-only'' jobs. In 1950, the Population Registration Act required that all South Africans be racially classified into one of three categories: white, black (African), or colored (of mixed decent). The coloured category included major subgroups of Indians and Asians. Classification into these categories was based on appearance, social acceptance, and descent. For example, a white person was defined as ``in appearance obviously a white person or generally accepted as a white person.'' A person could not be considered white if one of his or her parents were non-white. The determination that a person was ``obviously white'' would take into account ``his habits, education, and speech and deportment and demeanor.'' A black person would be of or accepted as a member of an African tribe or race, and a colored person is one that is not black or white. The Department of Home Affairs (a government bureau) was responsible for the classification of the citizenry. Non-compliance with the race laws were dealt with harshly. All blacks were required to carry ``pass books'' containing fingerprints, photo and information on access to non-black areas.

In 1951, the Bantu Authorities Act established a basis for ethnic government in African reserves, known as ``homelands.'' These homelands were independent states to which each African was assigned by the government according to the record of origin (which was frequently inaccurate). All political rights, including voting, held by an African were restricted to the designated homeland. The idea was that they would be citizens of the homeland, losing their citizenship in South Africa and any right of involvement with the South African Parliament which held complete hegemony over the homelands. From 1976 to 1981, four of these homelands were created, denationalizing nine million South Africans. The homeland administrations refused the nominal independence, maintaining pressure for political rights within the country as a whole. Nevertheless, Africans living in the homelands needed passports to enter South Africa: aliens in their own country.

In 1953, the Public Safety Act and the Criminal Law Amendment Act were passed, which empowered the government to declare stringent states of emergency and increased penalties for protesting against or supporting the repeal of a law. The penalties included fines, imprisonment and whippings. In 1960, a large group of blacks in Sharpeville refused to carry their passes; the government declared a state of emergency. The emergency lasted for 156 days, leaving 69 people dead and 187 people wounded. Wielding the Public Safety Act and the Criminal Law Amendment Act, the white regime had no intention of changing the unjust laws of apartheid.

The penalties imposed on political protest, even non-violent protest, were severe. During the states of emergency which continued intermittently until 1989, anyone could be detained without a hearing by a low-level police official for up to six months. Thousands of individuals died in custody, frequently after gruesome acts of torture. Those who were tried were sentenced to death, banished, or imprisoned for life, like Nelson Mandela.
The apartheid policy was highly effective of achieving its goal of preferential treatment for whites, as is demonstrated by the statistics in Figure 1.

Where to go from here:

Next

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The History of Apartheid in South Africa

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South Africa (seemap ) is a country blessed with an abundance of natural resources including fertile farmlands and unique mineral resources. South African mines are world leaders in the production of diamonds and gold as well as strategic metals such as platinum.

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apartheid | Definition of apartheid in English by Oxford Dictionaries

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Definition of apartheid - (in South Africa) a policy or system of segregation or discrimination on grounds of race.

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Apartheid (South African English pronunciation: ; Afrikaans: [aˈpartɦəit], it. "separateness") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation and discrimination that existed in South Africa between 1948 and 1991. It was based on white supremacy and the repression of the black ( African, Coloured and Indian) majority of the population for the benefit of the politically and economically dominant group, Afrikaners, and other Whites.

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A review, and links to other information about and reviews of Disgrace by J.M.Coetzee.

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by admin | Mar-31-2008

The following essay from novelist Tony D'Souza continues the NBCC's In Retrospect series, with an essay on J.M. Coetzee's 1999 novel "Disgrace," which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in fiction and winner of the Booker Prize. (Read NBCC member Andrew O'Hehir's review of "Disgrace" in Salon here.)
J.M Coetzee's "Disgrace" is about a lot of things, but at its heart it is an anatomy of racial hierarchy change in contemporary South Africa. A very quiet side note to this is its analysis of man's disgraceful treatment of animals. "Disgrace" is a pitiless and errorless book about the condition of the human experience at the end of the twentieth century; while not altogether without hope, the book and its title is a condemnation of the basic state of modern humanity.

What happens in this book can be summed up quickly. Professor David Lurie, a white, thoroughly Western, classical intellectual and defender of the canon forces himself upon an undergraduate student who at first invites his advances. Lurie has done this sort of thing before, but he is aging and less in tune with what he can and can't get away with. Through machinations that may or may not be of her own accord, the girl, Melanie Isaacs, brings an abuse charge against the professor, and his stubborn refusal to acknowledge what he has done as well as the changed context of his post-Apartheid nation lead to his dismissal in 'disgrace' from the university. He takes refuge on his daughter Lucy's farm in the Eastern Cape.

There we are introduced to Petrus, her black neighbor who is slowly taking advantage of the changed social order to lift himself from a "dog-man" to a substantial land holder. Lucy is nearly alone in her refusal to join the "white-flight" exodus out of such predominantly black areas; in the book's most dramatic scene she is raped by three black men as her father is locked in a bathroom and set afire. The dogs that she tends and loves are massacred with her own gun; her father is left to deal on his own with her abuse, which becomes a metaphor for the abuse of white South Africa by the black South Africa that is as angry as it ever was in its new empowerment. Lucy becomes pregnant during the attack and decides not only not to press charges against her attackers, but to keep the child; her father David, who has lost everything, ends the book with a vision of his daughter working stooped over in her fields. He sees her as a peasant; he understands that all the centuries of white rule and progress in the country have come to naught.

"Disgrace" is the definitive work on South Africa's present state. In an early dramatic scene, Lurie is confronted by Melanie Isaacs's father outside of his office at the university. Though the girl's father is white, as is Lurie, his words speak to the anger that is the inheritance of forcible white rule in South Africa:

"'Professor,' he begins, laying heavy stress on the word, 'you may be very educated and all that, but what you have done is not right...We put our children in the hands of you people because we think we can trust you. If we can't trust the university, who can we trust?...No, Professor Lurie, you may be big and mighty and have all kinds of degrees, but if I was you I'd be very ashamed of myself, so help me God. If I've got hold of the wrong end of the stick, now is your chance to say, but I don't think so, I can see it from your face.'" And when Lurie finds the accusation beneath him and turns away, the girl's father shouts, "'You can't just run away like that! You have not heard the last of it, I tell you!'"

And indeed Lurie is not able to just run away, as the last Apartheid rulers could not avoid the inquiries and judgments of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In scenes wholly representative of that body, and as familiar as any university judiciary committee in the newly liberalized West, Lurie is called to account for his harassment of Melanie before a mixed raced panel: "At five o'clock he is waiting in the corridor. Aram Hakim, sleek and youthful, emerges and ushers him in. There are already two persons in the room: Elaine Winter, chair of his department, and Farodia Rassool from Social Sciences, who chairs the university committee on discrimination..."

What this panel wants most from Lurie is an apology, a statement of admission that what he has done was wrong. And like a stalwart of the old order, Lurie refuses to admit anything but his actions. Fine enough in most cases, but not in South Africa, where culprits cannot be sent away but must somehow be woven into the fabric of society. What the new order wants from the old is not an admission of guilt, but a kowtow, one that Lurie is unwilling to give. One of his non-white colleagues offers Lurie this bit of advice, "'Take a yellow card. Minimize the damage, wait for the scandal to blow over...Sensitivity training. Community service. Counseling. Whatever you can negotiate.'"

"'Counseling? I need counseling?'" Lurie incredulously asks. Even friendly colleagues soon abandon him, so thorough is Lurie's inability to understand how his world has changed. In an example of Coetzee's most beautiful writing, the height of the media frenzy that surrounds Lurie's trial is described like this: "They circle around him like hunters who have cornered a strange beast and do not know how to finish it off."

Lurie is stripped of his titles and rank and finds himself on the rural farm of his lesbian daughter Lucy. Lucy is making do as the last hanger-on of a white hippie commune in the Eastern Cape, growing vegetables and flowers for market and keeping a boarding kennel of guard dogs, all those Rottweilers and German Shepherds and ridgebacks that upheld and became symbols for the worst of white rule's abuses. Here Lurie meets Petrus, who introduces himself to the professor in this way, "'I look after the dogs and I work in the garden...I am the gardener and the dog-man.' He reflects for a moment. 'The dog-man,' he repeats, savoring the phrase."

Once upon a time in South Africa, Petrus would have been just that, the impoverished and disenfranchised dog-man, the hired man who shoveled shit and fed offal to Lucy's dogs. But the South Africa that Lurie would not bow to at the university has changed so thoroughly here in its rural reaches that the irony with which Petrus introduces himself is lost on neither of them. For though Petrus does tend to Lucy's dogs for a wage, he has gained his own holding of land which abuts Lucy's farm, is building a house, is gaining more. While Petrus labors at his fields and schemes on how to make Lucy's land his own, Lurie looks at his refuge on his daughter's farm as a time to finally complete his life's opus: an opera about Byron's last amorous days in Italy.

Here, Coetzee sets up a wonderful juxtaposition about the two cultures that have just changed positions. The work of Petrus' ascendant black Africa has to do with toil and sweat and the growth of the soil, while the work of Lurie's descendent white Africa has to do with an opera that most likely will never be completed and, as Lurie freely admits to himself, will never make any money. All through this book, Coetzee subtly reveals the ways in which the West has become irrelevant in South Africa. On Lucy's farm, Lurie must contend with people who speak African languages he does not and will never know, who know nothing of Byron nor anyone else in the Western canon, who do not treasure these things, who are happy to ransack white homes for food and electronics but who leave the works of the great Western canon behind. As Lurie sees it, the crimes committed against himself and his daughter, indeed the violent crimes vivisecting the country as it was at Apartheid's end, are not simply crimes, but individual sallies in a great black war of vengeance. This is illuminated most clearly when Lurie returns to his apartment in Cape Town:

"He wanders through the house taking a census of his losses. His bedroom has been ransacked, the cupboards yawn bare. His sound equipment is gone, his tapes and records, his computer equipment. In his study the desk and filing cabinet have been broken open; papers are scattered everywhere. The kitchen has been thoroughly stripped...No ordinary burglary. A raiding party moving in, cleaning out the site, retreating laden with bags, boxes, suitcases. Booty; war reparations; another incident in the great campaign of redistribution. Who is at this moment wearing his shoes? Have Beethoven and Janá cek found homes for themselves or have they been tossed out on the rubbish heap?" The reader can't help but amending the final line with the obvious conclusion, 'the rubbish heap of history.'

Coetzee is an agile writer, filling his pages with action and images that make "Disgrace" the page-turner that it is. "Things fall apart" in a moment in Coetzee, just as for someone like Lurie they did in his home country with the '94 change of government. The anger and tensions building in "Disgrace" finally spill across the page on a day like any other on the farm, the beautiful wild geese who visit coasting across the surface of Lucy's irrigation dam. Lucy and her father have taken two of the dogs, Dobermans, out for a long walk, they discuss history, symbolism and psychology in relation to Lurie's dismissal from the university; when they return to the house, the dogs, guards and watchdogs all, are in an uproar, and three black men are waiting for them. The men have a story about a sick woman in the act of childbirth, it's an emergency, may they use the phone? Lucy cages the dogs and lets the men in. Here Coetzee reveals the breadth of his mastery. The action is quick and definitive; there is nothing theoretical about it:

"A blow catches [Lurie] on the crown of the head. He has time to think, If I am still conscious then I am all right, before his limbs to water and he crumples. He is aware of being dragged across the kitchen floor...He is in the lavatory, the lavatory of Lucy's house. Dizzily he gets to his feet. The door is locked, the key is gone...So it has come, the day of testing. Without warning, without fanfare, it is here, and he is in the middle of it...The door opens, knocking him off balance...'The keys,' says the man...The man raises the bottle. His face is placid, without trace of anger. It is merely a job he is doing: getting someone to hand over an article. If it entails hitting him with a bottle, he will hit him, hit him as many times as is necessary...[Lurie] speaks Italian, he speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest Africa...Mission work: what has it left behind...Nothing that he can see...Now the tall man appears from around the front, carrying the rifle. With practiced ease he brings a cartridge up into the breech, thrusts the muzzle into the dogs' cage...There is a heavy report; blood and brains splatter the cage."

Throughout the attack, Lurie remains locked in the bathroom, watching the violence through the bars over the bathroom's small window, imprisoned by the lock and heavy door of his white culture's own device. It's an image that call to mind Robben Island.

The dogs are slaughtered, Lucy is raped, Lurie is doused with methylated spirits and set afire. When the door to the bathroom is momentarily opened so that the men can toss the spirits onto him, what Lurie sees reveals the genius of Coetzee's artistic eye, "...he glimpses the boy in the flowered shirt, eating from a tub of ice cream."

If Lurie had felt bitter and helpless before in this changed and unfamiliar world, the attack leaves him broken. He fixates on what happened to Lucy in her bedroom at the hands of those men, an act he could not see; his mind runs wild with his imagining of it: "No wonder [women] are so vehement against rape...Rape, god of chaos and mixture, violator of seclusions. Raping a lesbian worse than raping a virgin: more of a blow. Did they know what they were up to, those men? Had word got around?"

Lurie's relationship with his daughter has always been strained. Lucy knows her father's history with women, knows that the trouble he has brought on himself throughout his life because of them has been wholly of his own making. In a reverie, Lurie thinks of all those women like this, "...a stream of images pours down, images of women he has known on two continents, some from so far away in time that he barely recognizes them. Like leaves blown on the wind, pell-mell, they pass before him. A fair field full of folk: hundreds of lives all tangled with his. He holds his breath, willing the vision to continue. What happened to them, all those women, all those lives? Are there moments when they too, or some of them, are plunged without warning into the ocean of memory? The German girl: is it possible that at this very instant she is remembering the man who picked her up on that roadside in Africa and spent the night with her? Enriched: that was the word the newspapers picked on to jeer at. A stupid word to let slip, under the circumstances, yet now, at this moment, he would stand by it. By Melanie, by the girl in Touws River; by Rosalind, Bev Shaw, Soraya: by each of them he was enriched, and by others too, even the least of them, even the failures. Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness."

Just as Lurie passes judgment on blacks who commit crimes against whites in what he terms "the great campaign of redistribution," his reverie of women, like all those gilded monuments to progress and colonialism that litter the capitals of the Western World, should be judged on equal terms. While some of his adventures with women were mutually "enriching," others were not-his harassment of Melanie Isaacs was not, nor was his stalking of the "exotic" prostitute Soraya early in the book. Colonialism, and white South Africa, when judged through this prism, might rightly be lauded for the tractors and radios that people like Petrus and Lucy's rapists covet and use, but what cannot be forgotten are all the ways in which the colonizer simply took from the colonized to the "enrichment" of themselves. It might be nice to remember the brown arms of the women of the world's palm-fringed coasts, but the guns and steel that conquered those coasts and allowed those memories to be made were fired and swung by white hearts drunk with darkness.

Lucy has not forgotten this history, and it cannot be said that Lurie has forgotten it either. Whenever some abuse visits them from the world of the blacks, Lurie is quick to explain it away to perceived wrongs being made right. But where he and Lucy differ is that Lurie, just as in his refusal to apologize for his victimization of Melanie, does not truly see his fault in history; Lucy does, so much so that she even offers her body to it in penance. When one of her rapists returns and is revealed to be a relative of her neighbor Petrus, Lurie wants to report it to the police. Lucy stays him. "'Don't shout at me, David. This is my life. I am the one who has to live here...As for Petrus, he is not some hired laborer whom I can sack because in my opinion he is mixed up with the wrong people. That's all gone, gone with the wind.'" And later, of her rape and her response to it, she says, "'It was so personal...It was done with such personal hatred. That was what stunned me more than anything. The rest was...expected. But why did they hate me so? I had never set eyes on them...I think they have done it before...At least the two older ones. I think they are rapists first and foremost. Stealing things is just incidental. A side-line. I think they do rape...I think I am in their territory. They have marked me. They will come back for me. ...But isn't there another way of looking at it, David? What if...what if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying?'"

Her father rejects this, pleads with her, writers her a letter. "'Dearest Lucy, With all the love in the world, I must say the following. You are on the brink of a dangerous error. You wish to humble yourself before history.'" She writes him this back, "'...if I leave the farm now I will leave defeated, and will taste that defeat for the rest of my life.'"

Lucy is her own woman, has her own response to this changed hierarchy. Flight to Europe is not acceptable to her, she sees herself as a child of this soil. And now that the lordship of this soil has changed from white to black, she is vastly more willing to meet those terms than David is. Petrus confronts Lurie about Lurie's threats to turn the rapist brother-in-law in to the police: "'He is a child. He is my family, my people... You say it is bad, what happened...I also say it is bad. It is bad. But it is finish...It is finish.'" Petrus also offers the white man a solution to the problem of his daughter's security. "'He (the rapist) will marry her,' he says at last. 'He will marry Lucy, only he is too young, too young to be marry... Maybe one day he can marry, but not now. I will marry.'"

While Lurie is outraged, Lucy is not. She is pregnant, she is poor, she is alone, she is white. She tells her father, "'Objectively I am a woman alone. I have no brothers. I have a father, but he is far away and anyhow powerless in the terms that matter here. To whom can I turn for protection? To Ettinger? [Ettinger is the last of the old-style, and armed, Boer farmers in the area.] It is just a matter of time before Ettinger is found with a bullet in his back. Practically speaking, there is only Petrus left. Petrus may not be a big man but he is big enough for someone small like me.'"

When her father again expresses indignation, Lucy loses her patience, "'I don't believe you get the point, David. Petrus is not offering me a church wedding followed by a honeymoon on the Wild Coast. He is offering an alliance, a deal. I contribute the land, in return for which I am allowed to creep in under his wing. Otherwise, he wants to remind me, I am without protection, I am fair game...it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again...With nothing...No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity...like a dog.'"

Lucy's final point is made again and again in the book; animals suffer here at the hands of men of all colors. Goats are slaughtered for parties, sheep are staked and starved before their deaths, dogs suffer from the lottery of their own fecundity. In moving passages about Lurie's volunteer job-his unconscious admission that he does need to do penance in the world-putting them to sleep in a shelter, we see the only true moments of growth that ever come to him: "He has learned...to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty calling by its proper name: love." The thoughtless slavery of animals is quietly documented on page after page of "Disgrace," and sometimes not so quietly as when the gentle woman charged with the destruction of the cast-off dogs says to Lurie, "'Yes we eat up a lot of animals in this country...It doesn't seem to do us much good. I'm not sure how we will justify it to them.'" It's in this that Coetzee reaches beyond, showing that what equalizes and nullifies questions of history and race is the unity of man in its abuse of animals.

Here the curtain falls in the novel on the bad old white South Africa, opens on a newer, humbled one. The night Lurie spends in pillaged apartment is the best metaphor for his end of things: "The lights are cut off, the telephone is dead...he will spend the night in the dark...He is too depressed to act. Let it all go to hell, he thinks, and sinks into a chair and closes his eyes." Lucy in her fields, "...is becoming a peasant." And Petrus on his tractor is the new boss. What his rule will mean is not the subject of this book, but the fact of his coming into power is. Of the child that Lucy will soon bear, Lurie thinks this, "So it will go on, a line of existences in which his share, his gift, will grow inexorably less and less, till it may as well be forgotten."

Wouldn't it be happy to think so? But what is more likely for South Africa as with so many colonized and troubled places in the world is a metaphor that Coetzee offers us much earlier in the book, when Lurie and Petrus are down together in a drained storage dam, working, doing a nasty job, shoveling out the muck. It's a tight, fetid place they must inhabit together. Within moments, as a sorry testament to who we really are, the white man and the black man lift their voices in argument. It's not hopeful, but it's also not hopeless. "Disgrace," like that perfect scene, is simply an anatomy of the truth.-Tony D'Souza

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In Retrospect: "Disgrace," Coetzee's Masterpiece

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by admin | Mar-31-2008 The following essay from novelist Tony D'Souza continues the NBCC's In Retrospect series, with an essay on J.M. Coetzee's 1999 novel "Disgrace," which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in fiction and winner of the Booker Prize.

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This decent, extremely faithful adaptation of Nobel laureate JM Coetzee's 1999 Booker-winning novel is the work of an Australian team led by director Steve Jacobs and screenwriter Anna Maria Monticelli. John Malkovich stars as the arrogant 52-year-old David Lurie, a lecturer in English literature at a Cape Town university, who loses his job after refusing to apologise sufficiently for an affair with a coloured student and then joins his lesbian daughter at a remote farm where she is raped by three young marauding black men. The contrasted ways father and daughter react to this terrible act define their responses to a radical social change.

Disgrace is both a compelling human fable and a complex, ambiguous allegory of post-apartheid South Africa, raising issues about white guilt, black vengeance, the shift in political power and the problems occasioned by the country's deeply divided past and problematically shared future. Malkovich invariably plays men apart and is here well cast as a fastidious intellectual, a Byronic authority on Byron, standing aloof equally from the unjust society in which he was raised and the new one in which he uncomfortably finds himself. His oddly strangulated accent contributes to a sense of alienation, though one doubts if this was the intention. This chilly film gets surprisingly close to the tone of Coetzee's precise prose.
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This decent, extremely faithful adaptation of Nobel laureate JM Coetzee's 1999 Booker-winning novel is the work of an Australian team led by director Steve Jacobs and screenwriter Anna Maria Monticelli.

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It's often said that good novels make bad films: they're too nuanced, too complex, too long to fit into a slot two hours long. Readers don't thank film-makers for trampling on their treasured mental visions of a book - for making Sebastian Flyte shout "All you ever wanted was to fuck my sister!" at Charles Ryder, as in last year's film of Brideshead Revisited, or for casting Demi Moore as Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter or Nicolas Cage as Captain Corelli. The resulting adaptations tend to be, at worst, a travesty (Bonfire of the Vanities, Love in the Time of Cholera) and, at best, faithful and bloodless (Atonement, Revolutionary Road) - weighed down by the desire to do justice to a big reputation.

Few contemporary novels have a bigger reputation than Disgrace, JM Coetzee's chilly, shocking 1999 tale of post-apartheid South Africa, which comes with Booker and Nobel prizes attached and is regularly cited as one of the best English language books of recent years. The Australian husband and wife team of director Steve Jacobs and screenwriter Anna-Maria Monticelli were, however, undaunted - even though one assumes that Coetzee, who demanded full script approval, wasn't the easiest or most forgiving collaborator ("His intellectual honesty erodes all basis of consolation and distances itself from the tawdry drama of remorse and confession," noted the Swedish Academy approvingly). They also chose John Malkovich, America's scariest character actor, as their leading man. All in all, the adaptation must have been a terrifying prospect - particularly if one considers that, in South Africa at least, the book is highly controversial.

Like most of Coetzee's work, Disgrace is richly suggestive. It reads like a parable, or perhaps a series of interconnected parables. David Lurie, a disillusioned white South African professor of literature, is drummed out of his job in Cape Town after he has an affair with a female student and refuses to make an appropriately contrite public statement. He then joins his hippyish lesbian daughter Lucy on a smallholding in the Eastern Cape, where she lives alone, growing flowers and vegetables for sale at a farmers' market. There, the two are subjected to a brutal attack at the hands of three black men; Lucy is gang-raped; Lurie is set on fire with methylated spirits. To her father's horror, she decides to keep the child that she conceives as a result, and to stay on the farm despite the danger - handing over her land to her neighbour and former farmhand, Petrus, who seems to be implicated in the attack, and throwing herself on his mercy. Lurie, struggling to find a new role for himself, fails to write an opera about Byron in Italy, and instead devotes his time to euthanising unwanted dogs at a local animal welfare clinic. Deftly sweeping up various big subjects - political correctness on campus, crime and rape, sex and exploitation, land ownership and historical wrongs, the treatment of animals - into one compact, unified narrative, the book seems to encourage one chunky, unified interpretation.

Certainly, Disgrace has been taken that way in South Africa, where its central episode is unmistakably political. A wave of attacks on white-owned farms since 1994 has seen at least 2,500 people killed and many raped and tortured. Many white farmers regard these as a concerted attempt to drive them off the land (some attacks have been led by squatters and others have come in tandem with claims to restore historical land rights), which are ignored or even covertly sponsored by the ANC government - "One settler, one bullet", "Killthe Boer, kill the farmer", went the old revolutionary slogans. The government and police dismiss this view entirely, seeing the attacks as just another instance of the much larger problem of violent crime in South Africa, or possibly a result of maltreatment by farmers of their black workers.

In this heated context, the ANC issued an official denunciation of Coetzee's novel, accusing him of "subliminal racism" and of dealing in stereotypes about black male sexual violence. The then president Thabo Mbeki objected to its portrayal of the country, saying: "South Africa is not only a place of rape." And, from one perspective, you could see the book as a parable in which the hopes of the "rainbow nation" are systematically crushed, and the characters fall back on their old racial emnities. When Lurie finds one of Lucy's attackers, since revealed as Petrus's disturbed nephew Pollux, peeping at his daughter through the window, he attacks him: "He would like to give the boy a sound thrashing. Phrases that all his life he has avoided seem suddenly just and right: Teach him a lesson, Show him his place." The nephew responds by kicking at Lucy's potato beds and shouting: "We will kill you all." During the conversation that immediately precedes this incident, Petrus explains that he must protect Pollux, because he is one of "my people". "So that is it", Lurie thinks. "No more lies. My people. As naked an answer as he could wish. Well, Lucy is his people."

Conversely, RW Johnson, a fierce critic of the ANC, complains that Disgrace convicts all white South Africans of "collective guilt". In the first section of the book, Lurie visits a coloured prostitute and then sexually preys on the student, Melanie, whom he calls "Melani: the dark one"; one of their encounters is describes as "not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless". Johnson argues that the book is saying: like South African whites down the ages Lurie has taken advantage of those in a weaker position than him; and thus both he and Lucy are symbolically punished - the sins of the fathers are visited upon them. When his daughter asks why her rapists seemed to hate her so much, Lurie suggests: "It was history speaking through them. A history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It may have seemed personal, but it wasn't. It came down from the ancestors." Self-abasement seems to be the only way out for them - Lucy gives up all her rights and lives "like a dog", Lurie spends his time picking out his doomed opera on a banjo among the stray dogs in the backyard of the clinic, while having a desultory affair with the "remarkably unattractive" Bev Shaw. The message of Disgrace, Johnson says, is that white South Africans ought to emigrate, as Coetzee himself did in 2002: "If you are white, no positive, active role is left to you. Either you accommodate yourself to the unreasonable, or you play out your life in some futile back alley. You are doomed to this by the disgraceful history of your kind. Maybe it's fair, maybe it's not, but it is the way things are."

All of this is another way of saying that the novel is rich and resonant enough to inspire fierce, competing interpretations, and unflinching enough to make some of them rather uncomfortable. So it's not surprising, in the circumstances, that Jacobs decided to step back and take a neutral position: "I tried to make the film like the book," he explained. "It was a surgical examination of a situation, not an argument for or against the situation. It's like you're a witness rather than a participant." In many respects, the screenplay is meticulously faithful to the novel: most of the dialogue is taken word for word; with some inevitable compressions and a few modifications, the story follows the book scene for scene.

The problem with this approach is that Disgrace, though written in the third person, is clearly told from David Lurie's point of view. From the very first line onwards, which describes his visits to the prostitute, the book's voice is his voice - sharp, dry, and cultured, but lacking some basic human warmth: "For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well." Instead, in the film's first scene you see Lurie gazing through a Venetian blind, telling the woman that he is worried about his daughter: a minor change which seems nevertheless to strike very much the wrong note.

Naturalistic dialogue is not one of Coetzee's special gifts. In his fiction, speech tends to be used either for the crisp expression of ideas, or to show characters failing to communicate. (After the attack Lurie asks Lucy: "'Are you alright? Are you hurt?' Stupid questions; she does not reply.") The genius of Disgrace lies to a large extent in Coetzee's use of free indirect style, in his presentation of Lurie's perspective: what Lucy calls his "terrible irony" and, later on, his anguish; his wonderfully clever yet often very partial vision. So, for instance, when he tells the disciplinary panel that he had an affair with Melanie because he "became a servant of Eros", part of the drama, the strange comedy, is that he doesn't note his inquisitors' reaction to this unusual defence. In the film, by contrast, you get a disappointingly literal reaction shot of their bemused faces. Instead of the brilliance of the narrating voice - never more brilliant than in the terrible scenes in which Lurie is locked in the lavatory during the rape - the viewer sees Malkovich staring blankly, or gurning through what seems like a rather spare and diagrammatic drama.

Malkovich is certainly compelling. He has the right mixture of cold creepiness and magnetism for the main part, and he shows flashes of amazing talent, particularly when he is being condescending to other characters. But he is badly weighed down, both by his baggage as an upmarket panto villain - Being John Malkovich has surely fatally damaged him as a serious actor - and by his terrible South African accent: a flat, strangled monstrosity which means that the viewer can often concentrate on little else. An otherwise impressive cast struggles to cope: Jessica Haines is good, though much too pretty, as Lucy. The French actor Eriq Ebouaney is terrific as Petrus - succeeding where Malkovich's mannered performance fails, creating by gesture and speech a character as rich as Coetzee's description: "If there is such a thing as honest toil, then Petrus bears its marks. A man of patience, energy, resilience. A peasant, a paysan, a man of the country. A plotter and a schemer and no doubt a liar too, like peasants everywhere. Honest toil and honest cunning."

In general, Disgrace is a creditable, serious film which is driven along by its viscerally gripping plotline. It's probably as good as it could have been, given the constraints placed on it by the "talent". There's a loss of nerve at the end, perhaps: instead of ending with the miserable scene in which Lurie gives up to the fatal injection the stray dog he has come to love, it finishes with the penultimate one, in which he visits Lucy at her smallholding. The pair put their quarrels behind them, and there is a tentative suggestion of "a new footing, a new start". But the switch does emphasise the movie's one undoubted advantage over the book: the shots of farm's setting, in bleakly picturesque area of the Eastern Cape - a place that partially justifies Lucy's powerful love of the land. Coetzee himself characteristically chose to not to comment on the film, beyond remarking that: "Steve Jacobs has succeeded beautifully in integrating the story into the grand landscape of South Africa."

Disgrace will be shown at the ICA, The Mall, London SW1 from December 1. Box office: 020 7930 3647. www.ica.org.uk
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First Chapter: 'Disgrace'
By MICHAEL GORRA

By J. M. Coetzee. DISGRACE

220 pp. New York:
Viking. $23.95.

mong the major South African writers J. M. Coetzee has perhaps been unique in his unwillingness to write directly about life under apartheid. Of his earlier books, only the 1990 novel ''Age of Iron'' was set in a recognizable national present; and even there he concentrated less on politics than on his cancer-stricken heroine's preparations for death. He has experimented with historical fiction and postmodern pastiche and has even, in the 1983 novel ''Life & Times of Michael K,'' written something like a fable. His country's disgrace has always figured in his work, but, as you might expect from someone who wrote a dissertation on Beckett, it has most often figured obliquely.

In this, Coetzee is very different from the other great South African novelist of our day, the Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer. Literary history is full of pairs -- think, say, of Whitman and Dickinson -- whose names seem to complement each other. But sometimes two names can stand as alternatives: Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, as George Steiner observed long ago. I suspect that with these two it will indeed be ''or.'' Gordimer is expansive where Coetzee is spare, and if her sentences are often knotty and elliptical, she nevertheless remains committed to a kind of social realism. Coetzee's prose has, in contrast, an accessible ease that belies the slippery nature of his work as a whole. Each is a gambler, but they've staked their careers on different games: Gordimer so timely that she risks obsolescence, Coetzee so determined to avoid a fiction based on what he has called ''the procedures of history'' as to chance his own irrelevance.

They have been among each other's most powerful critics. It is therefore curious that their most recent books seem so oddly similar, as if the end of apartheid has brought them closer together. Both Gordimer's 1998 novel ''The House Gun'' and Coetzee's ''Disgrace'' -- winner of this year's Booker Prize -- develop out of judicial procedures: a murder trial in Gordimer's work, and in Coetzee's the charge of sexual harassment that separates his protagonist, David Lurie, from his profession. Neither of these books sits easily as anything like an allegory of the fact-finding commission headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; still, the judicial connection can be no accident. Yet neither book stops with such procedures. Though most of Gordimer's novel does in fact deal with the trial, she ends by exploring the mystery of the transition from life to death. ''Disgrace'' finishes quickly with the question of judgment; its real interest lies in what comes after, when all one's days are stamped with the word of its title. And the way the novel develops suggests that it is perhaps Coetzee, despite his resistance to a historically conditioned realism, who has the more deeply political mind.

BOOK EXCERPT"For a ninety-minute session he pays her R400, of which half goes to Discreet Escorts. It seems a pity that Discreet Escorts should get so much. But they own No. 113 and other flats in Windsor Mansions; in a sense they own Soraya too, this part of her, this function.

"He has toyed with the idea of asking her to see him in her own time. He would like to spend an evening with her, perhaps even a whole night. But not the morning after. He knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone."

-- from the first chapter of 'Disgrace'

A Cape Town literature professor, Coetzee's central character believes that ''for a man of his age, 52, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.'' That's the novel's first sentence, and it tells us that David Lurie hasn't solved the problem at all. This is simply the status quo whose rupture will produce a story. The commas are lovely in the way that they parse out his situation, bracketing off ''to his mind'' in order to suggest the limits of his solution, his regular Thursday afternoons with Soraya of Discreet Escorts.
Lurie is an ironic man, but Coetzee's own irony has a surgical precision that slices through and beyond and around the character's own. One night he invites a student home for a drink, then dinner, then asks her ''to do something reckless.'' And though he believes, or says he believes, that ''a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone,'' eventually there comes a moment that even he knows is wrong: ''Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core.'' The young woman remains passive, ''as though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away.''

She goes slack but not silent, and so comes Lurie's disgrace. After the uproar of faculty committees and reporters' flashbulbs has passed, he takes refuge with his daughter, Lucy, on her smallholding in the countryside of the eastern Cape. Lucy runs a kennel and grows and sells produce and flowers at a weekly market; she is, he concludes, ''no longer a child playing at farming but a solid countrywoman, a boervrou.'' Lucy lives alone, helped only by a man named Petrus: once her employee but now, in the new South Africa, simply -- that is, not at all simply -- her neighbor and ''co-proprietor.'' ''I feel anxious about my daughter all alone here,'' Lurie tells him. But although Petrus says that ''everything is dangerous today,'' he adds that ''here it is all right, I think.'' Until the day that three strangers come along the path and ask to use the telephone.

Once inside, they ransack the house, sprinkle Lurie with alcohol and set him aflame, shoot the dogs and gang rape his daughter. His burns soon heal, but Lucy does not. Not in his eyes, anyway. She slips into a profound depression and refuses, at first unaccountably, to report the rape to the police. Then Lurie realizes that their attackers aren't unknown, that one of them is even related to Petrus's wife; that the police may be the only ones who don't know what happened. Yet does he know himself?

Lucy's friend Bev Shaw, who runs the animal shelter where, to his own surprise, Lurie soon begins to work, tells him that he can't understand; he wasn't in the room with Lucy when the rape took place. Still, he finds that ''he can, if he concentrates, if he loses himself, be there, be the men, inhabit them, fill them with the ghost of himself. The question is, does he have it in him to be the woman?''

In trying to think his way into Lucy's skin, Lurie comes to learn one of parenthood's most difficult lessons, learns to accept his child's fully autonomous existence even -- or especially -- when he thinks she is wrong. ''Sell up,'' he urges her, believing that her rapists will return. But Lucy refuses, and though she says she cannot get over ''the shock of being hated,'' she nevertheless insists that living with such danger is the price that whites must now pay for their right to remain on the land.

Reuters

J. M. Coetzee

There is much one could say about this brief but oddly expansive novel, about the range of concerns that Coetzee has woven seamlessly together. There is Lurie's attempt, as a specialist in Romantic poetry, to write a long-planned work on Byron, in which he finds himself adopting the voice of the poet's discarded mistress. There is a profound meditation on another kind of otherness, on the lives and the rights of animals, a topic Coetzee has explored in a recent volume of essays -- only here that meditation takes the form of the punishment and salvation that Lurie finds at Bev's animal shelter, helping her to put down abandoned dogs, holding them ''as the needle finds the vein and the drug hits the heart and the legs buckle and the eyes dim.'' I could note the way Coetzee makes us understand but not sympathize with Lurie's intellectual arrogance and incorrigible desire, and could then compare him to his child: each is beyond stubborn, but the daughter is marked by an integrity that her father knows he cannot claim for himself. And I could point to the stark and even schematic armature of the plot that links them, a plot in which what Lurie has in some sense done to another man's daughter is trebly visited on his own.
There is more in ''Disgrace'' than I can manage to describe here. But let me end by suggesting Coetzee's most impressive achievement, one that grows from the very bones of the novel's grammar. Lurie thinks of himself as having spent his career ''explaining to the bored youth of the country the distinction between drink and drink up, burned and burnt. The perfective, signifying an action carried through to its conclusion.'' ''Disgrace'' is, however, written in the present tense, and its title denotes a continuing condition. Disgrace continues. And so do the characters' lives, which at the end of the book remain unresolved and unfinished, their problems and possibilities still open.

This novel stands as one of the few I know in which the writer's use of the present tense is in itself enough to shape the structure and form of the book as a whole. Even though it presents an almost unrelieved series of grim moments, ''Disgrace'' isn't claustrophobic or depressing, as some of Coetzee's earlier work has been. Its grammar allows for the sublime exhilaration of accident and surprise, and so the fate of its characters -- and perhaps indeed of their country -- seems not determined but improvised. Improvised in the way that our own lives are; improvised in a way that recalls the subject of Coetzee's 1994 novel, ''The Master of Petersburg,'' the novelist whom we know as Dostoyevsky.

Coetzee won an earlier Booker Prize for ''Life & Times of Michael K.'' Last month's award made him the only writer ever to win it twice. ''Disgrace'' surely deserves such recognition. But that may, in time, come to seem among the least of this extraordinary novel's distinctions.

Michael Gorra teaches English at Smith College and is the author of ''After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie.''
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First Chapter: 'Disgrace' By MICHAEL GORRA By J. M. Coetzee. DISGRACE 220 pp. New York: Viking. $23.95. mong the major South African writers J. M. Coetzee has perhaps been unique in his unwillingness to write directly about life under apartheid.

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Elizabeth Lowry

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
Secker, 220 pp, £14.99, July 1999, ISBN 0 436 20489 4

The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee
Princeton, 127 pp, £12.50, May 1999, ISBN 0 691 00443 9

'The personal life is dead,' Pasternak wrote in Doctor Zhivago - 'history has killed it.' In J.M. Coetzee's new novel, Disgrace, which is set in a violent post-apartheid South Africa, David Lurie, a Cape Town academic, reaches a similar conclusion when his daughter Lucy is gang-raped by three black men at her isolated homestead in the Eastern Cape. 'But why did they hate me so?' Lucy asks. 'I had never set eyes on them.' 'It was history speaking through them,' her father replies. 'A history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It may have seemed personal, but it wasn't.' Lucy decides not to press charges, believing that this rape, in the South African context, is not 'a public matter'. In the face of irresistible historical change - the collapse of a corrupt order - the claims of the individual are necessarily of secondary importance, even irrelevant. Pasternak, of course, did not believe this. Does Coetzee?

J.M. Coetzee's reputation as one of the most important writers working in South Africa is now well established. His writing offers a Post-Modern engagement with a colossal theme: the impact, in Africa and elsewhere, of an expansionist Western political philosophy and the process of its subsequent dissolution, which raises the wider issue of the cultural authority to which fiction written within the Western tradition can lay claim. Coetzee is unique among South African novelists working in English. He is a South African of Western descent whose novels are distinguished by a vigorous interest in the terms of their own creation. From 'The Vietnam Project' and 'The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee' in Dusklands (1974), twin satires on the civilising mythologies underpinning US intervention in Vietnam and Boer expansion into the African interior in 1760, through the spare, fable-like narratives of In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life and Times of Michael K (1983), to the confessional monologue of Age of Iron (1990) and the literary-historical pastiches of Foe (1986) and The Master of Petersburg (1994), Coetzee's approach has been varied, his idiom pliable. He has written in the voice of a repressed Afrikaner spinster living on the platteland, of a Boer frontiersman, of an elderly woman dying of cancer in contemporary suburban Johannesburg, and of an 18th-century castaway. Virtuosity is not the point, however. Coetzee aims to question the status and the structures of colonial and post-colonial power from as many vantage points as possible. In Foe and The Master of Petersburg, written around imaginary episodes in the lives of Defoe and Dostoevsky, this interrogation is further refined into an examination of the nature of authorship and of the writer's authority over his subject. Coetzee's own style is sometimes parodic, sometimes allegorical. He has made free use of destabilising narrative devices such as mock appendices and fake forewords, and has a marked taste for open-endedness, sudden authorial interventions and abrupt truncations. He is, in other words, preoccupied with narrative voice and form, with the means by which the fictional illusion is created and by which it can be disrupted.

For the South African novelist writing about the overwhelming internal pressures exerted on South African society by apartheid, and the wider legacy of colonialism, form has always been problematic. How should the volatile, explosive history of South Africa, a history in the making, be represented in fiction without lapsing into the impoverished aesthetic of merely political writing? The difficulty is that fiction necessarily deals with stories, and stories, as Coetzee once explained in an interview, 'are defined by their irresponsibility: they are, in the judgment of Swift's Houynhnhms, "that which is not"'. How is the novelist supposed to confine himself to reportage when 'the feel of fiction is one of freedom, of irresponsibility, or better, of responsibility toward writing something that has not yet emerged'? On the other hand, how can an author operating in a highly politicised culture write such stories - write fiction, in short - without seeming to duck the issue? Most English-language prose writers in South Africa, from Olive Schreiner through Nadine Gordimer and André Brink to Mongane Serote, have tried to reconcile these conflicting claims, the claims of history and fiction, by writing in the realist mode.

When Coetzee began to write, in the Seventies, he was one of the first South African novelists to act on the realisation that narrative is not ideologically neutral, but a product of history, impregnated with all sorts of subliminal cultural nuances. Realism, with its time-honoured ways of putting across a single point of view - the omniscient narrator, an implied author who is always authoritative, a reassuring degree of closure and so on - is the narrative mode most strongly identified with the Western novel. Coetzee's metafictions follow from the insight that a post-colonial novel aiming to make a point about the cultural arrogance of the coloniser cannot use realism as the vehicle for its critique without being undermined by its failure to challenge the conventions of the tradition it wishes to call into question.

This statement should perhaps be qualified. Gordimer's preference for realism as a narrative form is a sophisticated corollary of her belief that the primary role of the South African writer is truthfully to record or reflect. Writing is, for Gordimer, essentially a matter of representation. In the process, what she calls 'creative self-absorption' must always be checked by 'conscionable awareness'. Coetzee, however, doubts that the sort of literal reflection offered by Gordimer and writers like her tells us anything more real, or more truthful, than a more obviously imaginative approach would. His expressed preference is for a novel that 'operates in terms of its own procedures and issues in its own conclusions, not one that operates in terms of the procedures of history and eventuates in conclusions that are checkable by history (as a child's schoolwork is checked by a schoolmistress)'. It is this writerly stress in his fiction that has attracted criticism from other South African writers, such as Gordimer and Stephen Watson. Watson has objected that Coetzee's concern with textuality means that his work is 'little more than an artfully constructed void', while Gordimer has identified as a weakness what she calls his 'revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions'.

The argument is complicated by the fact that Coetzee has published a substantial body of criticism, including reviews and essays on censorship, dissent, linguistics and literary culture in South Africa - and more recently, in The Lives of Animals, on the philosophies of community invoked in the debate on animal rights. Coetzee is a writer's writer, a subtle theorist who is also in the business of producing fiction; a novelist who is both a critic and a linguist. Can such a writer, a self-conscious Post-Modernist, have anything engaging to say about the moral choices thrown up in the transitional societies which are the subject of his fiction? More narrowly, can he have anything engaging to say about the moral choices that are part of everyday life in post-apartheid South Africa? As it turns out, the answer is yes.

Disgrace is the best novel Coetzee has written. It is a chilling, spare book, the work of a mature writer who has refined his textual obsessions to produce an exact, effective prose and condensed his thematic concern with authority into a deceptively simple story of family life. Half campus novel, half anti-pastoral, it begins quietly enough in Cape Town. Five years or so have passed since the new Government took power. The narrative voice is that of 52-year-old David Lurie, who teaches communications at the Technical University, where his real subject, modern languages, has been abolished as part of a nationwide rationalisation of educational resources. Lurie is still allowed to run a single course on the Romantic poets, but he is a poor communicator working with poor material: students who are the typical products of a 'post-Christian, post-historical, post-literate' South African education, lacking a basic grounding in the context and sources of the literature which they are studying. While going through the motions of teaching them, Lurie toys with the idea of writing a chamber opera about Byron's love affair with the 19-year-old Teresa Guiccioli, which the poet began in Italy in 1819 after being ostracised in England for his scandalous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta. Lurie, too, has Byronic good looks and a Byronic sexual appetite, specifically a taste for 'exotic' women, which he satisfies by helping himself to sex with a coloured prostitute who works under the name of Soraya, and then (after she cuts their meetings short) with a pretty, dark-haired young woman in his class called Melanie, whom he nicknames Meláni, 'the dark one'.

Lurie is described as having sex with Melanie some three or four times, during which she remains inert, barely co-operative. Shortly afterwards, she charges him with harassment. Hauled up before an investigating committee, he pleads guilty but refuses to do so in the breast-beating, confessional way demanded of him and is dismissed. At this point the scene shifts from the Western Cape to the Eastern, from Cape Town to 'old Kaffraria', where the disgraced Lurie joins his daughter in Salem. Lucy is a subsistence farmer. She sells her produce on a market stall in nearby Grahamstown and runs a kennels on the side, in an implicit retreat from her father's way of life and his values. Their relationship is troubled. She is a large, plain girl, the sort of woman whom Lurie would immediately dismiss on physical grounds, and a lesbian. Later, we remember that she shares her name with a virgin-martyr. She is occasionally helped in her work by a black farmer called Petrus, whose property abuts her own and who is rapidly consolidating his own recently won independence as a landowner. Now and then, Lurie works for Petrus, relishing the 'historical piquancy' of their role reversal. He also assists reluctantly at the local animal clinic run by Bev Shaw, whom he describes as a 'remarkably unattractive' middle-aged woman.

The rape is committed by three black strangers, two men and a boy, who force their way into Lucy's house one afternoon. They also shoot her kennelled dogs, then douse Lurie with methylated spirits, set him alight and drive off in his car. Father and daughter survive the attack and Lurie reflects on their good fortune:

Count yourself lucky to have escaped with your life. Count yourself lucky not to be a prisoner in the car at this moment, speeding away, or at the bottom of a donga with a bullet in your head. Count Lucy lucky too. Above all Lucy.

A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them.

One of the rapists - the young boy, whose name is Pollux - is related to Petrus and has recently become a member of his household. Petrus himself was suspiciously absent on the afternoon of the rape and refuses to comment on it. Realising that she is at risk of another attack, but resisting what seems increasingly like a plot by Petrus and his family to force her off her land, Lucy does not press charges, clinging instead to 'the comforts of theory': what if rape is 'the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves.' When she discovers that she is pregnant as a result of the rape she signs her property over to Petrus, agreeing to become his mistress in return for his protection. She will start again on this new footing, having paid her debt, 'with no cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity' - with nothing that can be taken away. 'Like a dog,' her father concludes. 'Yes,' Lucy replies, 'like a dog.'

Lurie is shaken by his daughter's self-dispossession, the more so because he, too, has very few resources left. His relationship with Lucy is breaking down. He realises that he will never finish his opera about Byron, which appears more and more irrelevant in the South African context. His face has been destroyed, signalling the end of his sexual identity. No longer attractive, and equipped by the rape with a sickening new appreciation of the ways in which women can be used by men, he submits to a self-abasement not unlike that of his daughter by having a relationship with Bev Shaw, whom he does not desire. He also submits completely to the work at the animal clinic, where he puts down unwanted and homeless dogs, becoming emotionally attached to one crippled dog in particular. The final scene of the novel shows Lurie about to surrender this dog, bearing it 'like a lamb' to the killing table.

In spite of its naturalistic setting, the schematic organisation of Disgrace works against a 'realistic' reading - in Coetzee's phrase, it operates in terms of 'its own paradigms and myths'. Of these, the most powerful are ones that Coetzee has used before to describe the colonial situation: the unnatural parent-child and male-female bonds, in which the normal ties of affection are fraying or already severed. The key elements in Disgrace - a sexually predatory father and an isolated, self-sufficient daughter who is raped by a black neighbour and submits to further sexual contact in the hope that this will bring her into community with her rapist - are also present in Coetzee's earlier story of an African farm, In the Heart of the Country. Set in the first half of this century, the novel is narrated by Magda, whose name (recalling the Afrikaans word for virgin, maagd), like Lucy's, suggests her separateness from those around her. Living alone with her father, resenting his tyranny over his dependants yet also complicit in sustaining it, Magda longs for an end to solipsism. She is aloof from her neighbours on the farm, a black labourer called Hendrik and his wife, Klein Anna. Hendrik is what Petrus would once have been, a bywoner without property rights. When her father overturns this hierarchy by taking Klein Anna as his mistress, Magda kills him. The breakdown of the master-servant relationship culminates in Magda's rape by Hendrik, resulting in a brief sexual liaison which ends when he abandons her. 'What passion he has shown for me has been a passion of rage,' she realises, dismayed. Concluding as it does with a total failure of reciprocity between parent and child, male and female, the coloniser and the colonised, In the Heart of the Country is a sombre work. On the face of it, Disgrace seems to offer a renegotiation of this stalemate, as a result of which Lucy and Petrus will manage to coexist; yet the novel's depiction of a world of disrupted relationships is subtler, and far bleaker, than that of the earlier book.

As so often in Coetzee's fiction, the characters in Disgrace have a metonymic or symbolic function. When we meet him in the early stages of the novel, David Lurie has sex with girls who are young enough to be his daughters - in a conversation with Melanie he nearly refers to himself as 'Daddy'. The implication is that he is an unnatural father, a predator rather than a protector. Both the prostitute Soraya and Melanie-Meláni are 'used' women and, significantly, they are both dark. The analogy with a certain kind of exploitative colonial paternalism is so lightly and deftly set up that it is barely noticeable. It nonetheless recalls similar moments in the earlier novels: the appropriation of Klein Anna by Magda's father; Eugene Dawn's ironic caption, 'Father Makes Merry with Children', for a photograph of an American soldier raping a Vietnamese girl ('The Vietnam Project'); the Boer settler Jacobus Coetzee's reference to the San women he has raped as rags 'you wipe yourself on and throw away' ('The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee'); and the Imperial Magistrate's compulsive desire, in Waiting for the Barbarians, for the Barbarian girl whom he has picked off the street and adopted as a concubine. The fundamental flaw in the colonial enterprise, the novels suggest, consists in this absence of a real relationship between the paternalistic power and its subjects.

This non-relationship is reinforced by those characters in Coetzee's fiction, such as Petrus and Hendrik, who are ciphers, whose souls are unreachable. Trying to get behind the facts of Lucy's rape, Lurie complains that 'talking to Petrus is like punching a bag filled with sand.' The elderly Mrs Curren in Age of Iron, which is set during the State of Emergency declared by the Nationalist Government in the late Eighties, comes up against a similar wall of silence when she tries to question the black vagrant who has taken up residence first in her backyard and then in her living-room. Estranged from her only daughter and now dying of cancer, Mrs Curren adopts the enigmatic Vercueil (whose name, again, echoes an Afrikaans word, verskuil, 'to hide') as a companion, but he remains little more than an impassive onlooker as the last scenes of her life are played out. Like David Lurie, Mrs Curren is a former teacher, who sees the world through the prism of the classics, her own specialised field of knowledge. She offers well-meant advice when the teenage son of her maid, Florence, is hunted by the police for his involvement in a township resistance group; but her moral lessons, drawn from Thucydides, fall on deaf ears.

Of the many examples of the gulf between white and black in the novels, two in particular stand out. In Life and Times of Michael K, the hero, a coloured gardener, escapes a Cape Town torn by civil war and journeys into the countryside, growing his own food and enjoying a brief idyll of freedom before being interned in a labour camp. In captivity he refuses to eat or speak. His dogged non-co-operation at first baffles and then intrigues the medical officer in charge of him, who finally declares that Michael K is 'an allegory . . . of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it'. This is Coetzee's most explicit attack on the unhealthiness of non-integration. The idea is given fuller treatment in his next book, Foe, where the silent other who resists interpretation is Friday. In Coetzee's reworking of Robinson Crusoe, the tale of Cruso's island kingdom is told to the famous man of letters, Daniel Foe, by Susan Barton, a castaway who spent a year on the island before being rescued by a passing ship and taking Friday back to civilisation with her. Much of the early part of Susan's account is taken up by descriptions of the island's domestic economy, a sterile arrangement in which Friday and Cruso labour all day to build terraces of stone where nothing is ever planted. Friday cannot speak because his tongue has been cut out, possibly by Cruso; he can only understand a few words of English, and he can neither write nor read. Back in England, Susan Barton talks at him ceaselessly, believing that 'if I make the air around him thick with words, memories will be reborn in him which died under Cruso's rule.' Still he remains an obstacle in the text, refusing to yield his meaning until, in a bold gesture, Coetzee intervenes in the narrative in his capacity as author and effectively divests himself of the authority to tell Friday's story. This gesture is glossed by Susan Barton's vivid realisation of the impenetrability of Friday's silence: 'His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me . . . Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face.'

The moment of authorial renunciation is a dramatic attempt to highlight what David Attwell, one of Coetzee's most perceptive critics, has called 'the silence in which so many are caught', the historical voicelessness of the colonised. In The Master of Petersburg the potential dangers of authorship are spelt out very clearly: we are shown a writer at work, trying to re-create the unknown inner life of his son, and betraying him through misrepresentation. Similarly, Susan Barton approaches Daniel Foe believing that he will set down her account of life on the island as accurately as possible, only to find that he rewrites it as a myth of the male pioneer. Foe is a supreme realist, a writer whose novelistic method is geared to the concealment of narrative artifice, who invents where necessary rather than leaving a loose end. Yet his narrative silences both Susan and Friday: Foe is the foe of truth. Whence Coetzee's metafictional intervention in his text, his refusal to speak on behalf of Friday.

This refusal is also a gesture of atonemement, which has its corollary in the acts of self-abnegation performed by so many of Coetzee's protagonists. Magda's submission to Hendrik is a form of penance, part of the 'purgatory we must pass through on the way to a land of milk and honey'. David Lurie recognises the same instinct at work in Lucy's surrender to Petrus and tells her: 'You wish to humble yourself before history.' The disfigured Lurie himself embarks on a parallel via negativa in his relationship with Bev Shaw, working out his own form of personal salvation by annihilating his sexual vanity and his sense of superiority.

At the clinic for unwanted animals, Lurie tends the most abject creatures and in the course of his work gains an imaginative insight into the suffering not only of animals, but of other people. His sacrifice of the wounded dog which he has tried in vain to protect accompanies his realisation that he has no rights over Lucy, and cannot tell her how best to survive - an insight that puts their strained relationship on a more equal footing.

It is from this perspective - the recognition that our moral health depends on our ability to acknowledge some kind of selfhood in others - that the Tanner Lectures which Coetzee recently gave at Princeton on the subject of animal rights can be best approached. The Lives of Animals is a strange book, as surprising and idiosyncratic as anything Coetzee has ever written. It consists of two lectures framed, in the manner of a novel, by the story of a tense encounter between a mother and her son. The lecturer is Elizabeth Costello, a novelist who has been asked to deliver a series of talks on a subject of her choice at Appleton College (just as Coetzee was asked to deliver the Tanner Lectures, on which the book is based. Mise en abyme, anyone?). The son is John Bernard, who teaches at Appleton and is not pleased at the prospect of being reunited with his mother, a militant vegetarian. He tells her: 'I haven't had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about the animal business.' On her arrival, she is plaintive and difficult, antagonising her daughter-in-law and exasperating John. Somewhere along the line, their relationship has developed into an emotional stand-off. Why?

Elizabeth Costello, like David Lurie, has a troubled relationship with her child. Her arguments in favour of vegetarianism are, as she freely admits, purely intuitive, based on a principle of active compassion and what she calls 'a desire to save my soul'. Her plea for restraint in our dealings with animals appeals to our capacity for imaginative 'sympathy, that allows us to share . . . the being of another'. That she cannot extend this sympathy to her family has to do with her own fears, now that she is elderly, about her place in its hierarchy. Her refusal to eat meat derives from a sense of her own kinship with the weak, and this sense of weakness is the key to her feelings about her son. Her affection for him is the helpless, vulnerable affection of the old, described by Mrs Curren in Age of Iron as 'the love that we have no alternative but to feel towards those to whom we have given ourselves to devour or discard'. It is a fearful affection, which knows that in human society the survival of the weak depends on the goodwill of the strong - the love of a dog for its master. And that fear is justified. 'What do you say, my friend?' Bev Shaw murmurs to the sick animal in her clinic before putting it out of its misery, 'What do you say? Is it enough?' 'There, there,' John Bernard whispers to the suffering Elizabeth Costello, before performing a swift emotional amputation by seeing his mother onto the plane that will remove her from his life. 'It will soon be over.'

Coetzee's fiction is in many ways informed by an old-fashioned liberal humanist vision. The novels demonstrate clearly that absolute power over the other, power without pity, is always asserted at great cost. Unnatural fathers who silence their children will be silenced by them in turn. Age of Iron takes its title from Florence's remark that her son, Bheki, and his comrades in the Guguletu revolutionary cell are 'like iron' in their cruelty. 'And when they grow up one day,' Mrs Curren asks Florence, 'do you think the cruelty will leave them? . . . They set people on fire and laugh while they burn to death. How will they treat their own children?' I suspect that what Coetzee's South African critics really object to in his work is the implication that this pattern, once established, is to some extent fixed. If he has a revulsion, in Gordimer's words, against 'political and revolutionary solutions', it is because he knows that revolution, too, has its place in the pattern. Where he invokes the language of revolution directly, as he does in The Master of Petersburg, its aridity is obvious. The speaker is Nechaev, the leader of an anarchist group intent not only on the end of Tsarism but on bringing about a new order in which individual rights will be obliterated: 'Revolution is the end of everything old, including fathers and sons. It is the end of successions and dynasties. And it keeps renewing itself, if it is true revolution. With each generation the old revolution is overturned and history starts again . . . everything is reinvented, everything erased and reborn: law, morality, the family, everything.' This is the personal life killed by history.

Disgrace is about a society in the process of being overhauled, in which morality has been 'erased and reborn' and all the terms have changed; this is the meaning of the name of the young rapist in the Petrus ménage - Pollux - with its incongruous classical associations. The world being jettisoned is that of David Lurie and Mrs Curren, with its interest in Romantic poetry and the classics - a world whose humanist values have failed to resolve the conflict between coloniser and colonised. And yet these very values - a respect for the individual, sympathy, restraint - become the measure of what is missing, in human terms, in the revolution. The truth is that there are two patriarchs in Disgrace: that Petrus represents a force for oppression without pity as great, potentially, as David Lurie's. Lurie has made use of Soraya and Meláni, but there is a lethal symmetry in the fact that his own daughter is used in turn and becomes a chattel of the Petrus clan - a bywoner, without a voice. When the novel ends, news of her rape has for some time been bruited around the district by her rapists. The point is that this is 'not her story to spread but theirs: they are its owners'. What Disgrace finally shows us is the promised victory of one expansionist force over another, with women as pawns, the objects of punitive violence. ('There must be some niche in the system for women.') The scenes of Petrus clearing his land, aided by Lurie, recall the passages in Foe in which Friday is set to work on the stone terraces, alongside his master. Petrus himself is recalcitrant, unyielding: he is the rock on which the future will be built. Disgrace is a deeply pessimistic book. It may have made the Booker shortlist, but it will not win unqualified praise from Coetzee's more prescriptive critics in the South African literary establishment.

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LRB · Elizabeth Lowry · Like a Dog: J.M. Coetzee

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'The personal life is dead,' Pasternak wrote in Doctor Zhivago - 'history has killed it.' In J.M. Coetzee's new novel, Disgrace, which is set in a violent post-apartheid South Africa, David Lurie, a Cape Town academic, reaches a similar conclusion when his daughter Lucy is gang-raped by . . .