Booker Winner visits the Smallholdings

South African author Coetzee's latest continues exploration of race.

What sort of position can a white writer take in the context of the new South Africa? This problematic question is at the heart of South African author J.M. Coetzees writing. His first eight novels, though different in style, all explore the different modes of discourse through which he, as a white South African author, can convey the reality of living in a country that has seen such a rapid shift in power. In the most recent of the eight, Disgrace, Coetzee continues this exploration. Winner of the 1999 Booker Prize, Disgrace articulates the same concern as Coetzees 1990 novel Age of Iron, in which a retired Professor of Latins struggle with cancer is symbolic of the waning force of humanism. Until the 90s, humanism was the primary discourse of white opposition to apartheid. But the tenuous hope Coetzee expresses in Age of Iron for the survival of humanism despite the violence of South Africas transitional years (the late 80s and early 90s) seems to have been snuffed out in Disgrace. The novel is set in the current phase of the countrys violent and troubled history. On the one hand, it is a phase characterized by criminal brutality on the part of former victims of apartheid, and on the other hand, by the public admissions of guilt by the perpetrators of apartheid crimes in the forum of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

The narrative is told through David Lurie, a divorced, passionless professor of English Literature whose seduction of one of his colored students precipitates a train of events that leads to him losing his job, his reputation and his lifestyle in Cape Town. Although Coetzee does not overtly mention the proceedings of the TRC, he alludes to them through Luries appearance before a university disciplinary committee. While Lurie is prepared to admit his guilt in abusing his position of authority by coercing the young student into a sexual relationship with him, that is as far as he will go. He refuses to make the hollow gesture of publishing an apology to maintain his position at the university. Aimless after his resignation, he decides to visit his daughter Lucy. She lives by herself on an isolated smallholding in the Eastern Cape that she shares with a black farmer, Petrus, in a farmhouse that previously housed a hippie commune to which she belonged. David and Lucys relationship is cordial but distant, and her choice to live off the land seems to be a calculated rejection of his intellectual, urban life. Her decision is informed by a refusal to live her life according to abstract ideas.

Petrus, who in the old days of apartheid would have been called boy even as a middle aged man and relegated to the ranks of simple farmhands, is the farms co-proprietor and a man of substance in the local black community. Lurie is unsure how to relate to Petrus: at first he seems determined to like him, the politically correct thing to do in the situation. But a shockingly violent incident involving Lucy changes everything. Suddenly Lurie is doubly disgracedfor his failure as a father to help his own daughter and for his abuse of the child-like student. Luries reaction to the incident is the opposite of Lucys. She resigns herself to living in the harsh, concrete realities of the present without resorting to any form of escape. She seems to accept the violence done to her and Petruss encroachment on her land as a kind of indirect punishment for the historical wrongs committed by her race. To Lurie, this is at first incomprehensible. He still needs to have recourse to avenues of escape from realityphysical pleasure; a fantasy about writing an opera on the poet Byron and his mistress Teresa; a longing for a former, more heroic self; anger and outrage. But the novel traces the process whereby he is able to find his own way of expiating his abuse of power and his guilt at being useless to his daughter and thereby is able to confront reality.

While Coetzee develops brilliantly the white characters in the novel, there is something disturbing about the one dimensionality of all of the black characters. Petrus in particular never becomes anything more than a stereotype of the newly empowered yet still angry black man, and the seeming shallowness of his value system is chilling. Yet perhaps Coetzee keeps Petrus at a distance to make us realize that despite Lucy and David's liberal attitudes to the new South Africa, the damage done by years of oppression will not just disappear. And they will not be spared the revenge.