Human Rights, Social Justice, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
In its engagement with the relative successes and failures of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace explicitly invokes the concept of human rights only to expose the many limitations of rights as vehicles for approaching social justice. Disgrace first juxtaposes its protagonist’s “rights of desire” with human rights, thereby exposing significant liabilities of rights talk. At the same time, it contemplates a communitarian mode of interpersonal solidarity as an alternative to the rights paradigm. However, in the end, its insistence upon the indeterminate status of justice is paradoxically what enables its ethical and political force.
The politics of shame and redemption in J.M. Coetzee's 'Disgrace'
n both J. M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace (1999) and Andre Brink's The Rights of Desire (2000), a middle-aged or older male protagonist (Coetzee's David Lurie is 52; Brink's Ruben Olivier is 65) has what might be seen as a fi nal fl ing (or, in David Lurie's Romantic version, "a last leap of the fl ame of sense before it goes out"—27) via a relationship with a much younger woman—in both cases, a university stu- dent—and faces life-changing decisions about work, life, and ethics. Brink's novel takes up a phrase from Disgrace—David's words to his daughter, Lucy: "I rest my case on the rights of desire"—and uses them to explore Ruben's "right to be frustrated, to be denied" in his sex life, his social interaction, and his place within postapartheid South Africa as a displaced Afrikaans librarian. Coetzee's novel, however, is about much more than this rather narrow reading of desire and it is on this novel rather than Brink's that I will concentrate. Disgrace is a complex exploration of the collision between private and public worlds; intellect and body; desire and love; and public disgrace or shame and the idea of individual grace or salvation. Set in a recognizably postapartheid South Africa, it is also concerned with what David Attwell and Barbara Harlow have called "the refashioning of identi- ties caught between stasis and change" (see Attwell and Harlow). This paper will explore some of these aspects of the novel. There is a clear thematic connection in this text with the novels of Dos- toevsky, a connection Coetzee has explored previously in his 1994 novel The Master of Petersburg, particularly in terms of the protagonist learning to love by humbling himself and by coming to terms with violence and death. In Disgrace, this occurs both through a tragic personal encounter with violence and through David's volunteer work at an animal clinic. Coetzee's novel also resonates with the national public spectacle of shame, confession, and forgiveness that was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, problema- tizing notions of morality and engaging with Dostoevskyan scepticism about "bad faith" and "double thought." This signals a more subtle and complex link between Dostoevsky and Disgrace in the form of Coetzee's nonfi ction essay "Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky" published initially in 1985 and republished in Attwell's edition of Coetzee's essays and interviews, Doubling the Point (1992). Both in the interview with Attwell that precedes the essay and in the essay itself, Coetzee muses on the
The Master of Petersburg: Confession and Double Thoughts in Coetzee and Dostoevsky
I n times of intense ideological pressure l ike the present, when the space in which the novel and history normal ly coexist l ike two cows on the same pasture, each m i n d i n g its own business, is squeezed to almost no th ing, the novel, i t seems to me, has only two options: supplementarity or rivalry. J. M. COETZE, "The Novel Today" J M . COETZE EXPRESED this op in ion i n an address at a book fair i n Cape Town, i n November 1 9 8 7 , at the mid-point of the worst years of the States of Emergency i n South Afr ica ( 1 9 8 6 8 9 ) . A t the time of the publication of his latest novel, The Master of Petersburg, i n early 1 9 9 4 , the political situation had changed i n ways unforeseeable i n 1987. The option of the novel's "rivalry" to history, on the other hand, seems (to him) as important as ever. The Master of Petersburg, set i n 1 8 6 9 , is a narrative about a Russian novelist coming out of self-imposed exile i n Dresden and returning to St. Petersburg to collect the papers and other belongings of his dead stepson, and i n the process becoming caught up i n various aspects of the dead boy's former life. It is not unti l 33 pages into the novel that we are told that the novelist is none other than Fyodor Mikhai lovich Dostoevsky, 1 but the alert (and well-read) reader will have guessed this long before. As we might expect with a writer like Coetzee, this is no straightforward portrait of the artist. A l though the fictional Fyodor is similar to the historical Dostoevsky—he has been residing i n Dresden to escape his creditors; he suffers from epilepsy and a ruinous fondness for gambling; he has a second Dostoevsky