Suffering in the Novel Disgrace

Brutal rape, death and suicidal thoughts are just a few of the things the characters in JM Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace, endure. The protagonist David Lurie is a communications professor in post-apartheid, South Africa. The setting is important because it makes race a factor in all of the story lines. David is accused of rape and sexual harassment by a student in his Romantic Poetry class. After refusing to admit fault to a committee of his peers, he is told to take a leave of absence.

David decides to take advantage of his reproach and visit his daughter Lucy who lives on an old commune turned dog kennel in Salem. While David is visiting Lucy, two men and a boy force their way into the home where they rape Lucy, set David on fire and kill all the dogs. In the novel, Disgrace by JM Coetzee, suffering is prevalent in every story line, not only through actual physical pain but also through emotional suffering.

David’s Affair

David’s affair with his student Melanie Issacs is the first major event where the reader sees serious suffering. This affair is passionless and feels forced but carries serious repercussions for David. Pushing himself upon unwilling partners is a repeated pattern for David. Early in the novel he describes his weekly appointment with a prostitute, Soraya. After she stops seeing him, David becomes infatuated with her and hires an investigator to find her. He calls Soraya at her home, which leads to her foreseeable request for him to stop harassing her.

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David is intelligent; he is aware he is over-compensating his inability to continue to attract women. He laments that: “[t]hen one day it all ended. Without warning his powers fled..Overnight he became a ghost. If he wanted a woman he had to learn to pursue her; often in one way or another to buy her” (Coetzee 7). This was also the case with Melanie, David allowed her to skip a test and miss several classes during their affair, but when she began to refuse him, he mentions she must retake the exam. In this way, David misuses his power to manipulate Melanie and makes her suffer after she rejects him fully.

When the situation with Melanie starts to go awry, David must confront a group of his peers. The committee is formed to hear his defense and decide on his professional fate. He is in hot water for not only the sexual harassment but also for falsifying Melanie’s grades to further their affair. When David vehemently rejects every opportunity to defend his actions the committee forces him to take a leave of absence. His stubbornness causes confusion and frustration among his peers, “They are his friends. They want to save him from his weakness, to wake him from his nightmare. They do not want to see him begging in the streets. They want him back in the classroom” (Coetzee 50). In the wake of his forced leave, David goes to Salem to stay with his daughter, Lucy. She lives in the country on an old abandoned commune, where she now takes care of dogs from the area. Lucy lives alone because her “friend,” Helen, who lived with her has left, but she has help with the land from her neighbor, Petrus. Petrus is a local who helps her with manual labor and the dogs. David who is usually ambivalent towards animals, notices one of the dogs Katy, an old abandoned bulldog. Coetzee uses animals to represent different kinds of suffering as well, “here, canine characters such as Katy and Driepoot interact with the protagonist, and images of dogs fill his imagination. They also appear ass tropes of violence in the focalizer’s consciousness” (Olson 119).

Attack and Suffering

The most severe form of suffering in this novel is left to the novel’s dramatic climax, when Lucy and David are attacked by three locals, one who happens to be Petrus’ nephew. Lucy is raped and David is badly burned. Petrus was out of town and unable to help, which David found this all too suspicious. He insists that Lucy report the rape to the police and confront Petrus, but Lucy refuses. It is not until later in the novel it is discovered that Lucy feels she deserves this punishment, “Lucy accepts her fate as a symbol of the redistribution of power in post-apartheid South Africa and sees her rapists as gathering apartheid debts. Her father – who was ironically a perpetrator in relation to the first sexual offense but a victim in the context of the second – now harbors a diametrically opposed view view about the importance of legal and financial restitution as a response to his daughters rape” (Mardrossian 74). Lucy ends up impregnated as a result of the rape and decides her bests option is to marry Petrus in order to stay protected on her land. This decision is alarming considering the relation between Petrus and the attacker.

“Yes I agree, it its humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that i what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but, With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity. Like a dog” (Coetzee 200). This is how Lucy decides to spend the rest of her life. Not only did she physically suffer and will continue too until the baby is born; but there is also her emotional suffering, her guilt and having to raise a child conceived during a rape. David’s actions exile him from his community with many casualties on the way. His character begins as the perpetrator and ends up as a helpless spectator and victim. Disgrace: A Novel, explores various dimensions of suffering and the individual responses to painful experiences both emotional and physical.

Works Cited

1. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace: A Novel. Penguin Books, 1999.
2. Olson, Greta. “’Like a Dog’: Rituals of Animal Degradation in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Abu Ghraib Prison .” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 44, no. 1, 2014, pp. 116–156. Literature Resource Center, union.discover.flvc.org/permalink.jsp?45edsgcl.381408992.
3. Mardrossian, Carine M. “Rape and the Violence of Representation in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 42, no. 4, 2011, pp. 72–83. Literature Resource Center, http://union.discover.flvc.org/permalink.jsp?45edsgcl.270727554.