The Postcolonial Sublime in Coetzee's Disgrace, Or, David Lurie's Aesthetic Education

Jana M.
Giles Of Gods and Dogs: The Postcolonial Sublime in Coetzees Disgrace 1
OF GODS AND DOGS: THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBLIME IN COETZEES DISGRACE, OR, DAVID LURIES
AESTHETIC EDUCATION
By Jana Mara Giles1
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Date: 2013.08.10 17:42:39 -05'00'
J. M. Coetzees novel Disgrace (1999) deconstructs the Western metaphysical

presuppositions underlying the sublime. David Lurie, the protagonist, begins the novel as a postapartheid, white South African professor of Wordsworthian Romanticism: The great archetypes
of the mind, pure ideas, find themselves usurped by mere sense images.2 The question he
confronts as the plot unfolds is, Can we find a way for the two to coexist?3 When he is fired
for seducing a student, he begins his journey to understand the obdurate embodiment of living
and the illusion of humanistic pure reason. While visiting his daughters homestead, he is set on
fire and locked in a room while Lucy, his daughter, is gang-raped by black Africans. Shed of his
previously enjoyed white male privilege, David endures a reversal of fortune and slowly begins
to learn sympathetic imagination for the other. The novel ends with David caring for and
euthanizing stray dogs, learning that all is immanence: there is no higher life.4
Two significant interventions regarding the sublime in the novel are those by Kimberly
Wedeven Segall and Sam Durrant. Both see the novel as staging the disruption of Davids
narcissistic romanticism, making the failure of the privileged to understand the experience of
oppression a precondition for a new relation grounded precisely in the acknowledgment of
ones ignorance of the other, on the recognition of the others fundamental alterity,5 and
subjecting David to a bodily abjection rather than a mental process of imaginative projection.6
My paper shares Durrants view that Disgrace turns Romanticism against itself as David
Published in The Sublime Today: Contemporary Readings in the Aesthetic, Ed. Gillian Pierce (Newcastle-UponTyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012): 13-48. All rights reserved.
2
Coetzee, Disgrace 22.
3
4
5
Sam Durrant, J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, and the Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination, in J.M. Coetzee
and the Idea of the Public Intellectual, ed. Jane Poyner (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2006), 120-21.
6
Durrant 130.
Jana M. Giles Of Gods and Dogs: The Postcolonial Sublime in Coetzees Disgrace 2
jettisons the egotistical sublime and begins to learn Keatsian negative capability.7 However,
while I come to a similar conclusionthat aesthetic judgment is valuable not for its uplifting
passage to transcendence but for its anchoring of the human mind in the material world8I will
use the theory of the differend in Jean-Franois Lyotards postmetaphysical philosophy as an
entre into Coetzees text.
Disgrace, I argue, represents the sublime as the differend which emerges from Davids
discounting of material existence in favor of the transcendent. It represents the political differend
first in terms of Davids behavior towards women, black Africans, and animals, which both
reflects and attempts to reinstate their pre-apartheid status as differend; and second, in David
himself becoming differend as he loses his social and political power, in the process discovering,
or at least newly wanting to discover, that he has it in him to become the woman,9 to become
like a dog.10 The sublime in Coetzees postcolonial and postmodern incarnation no longer
guarantees access to the abstractions of pure practical reason, instead redirecting our focus to our
immersion in material events, demanding that we witness and address our political differends. As
that which signals the incommensurability between reason and imagination, the feeling of the
differend gives us another means of interpreting our experience. Belatedly and only halfconsciously recognizing his failure to imagine himself as other, his emotions signal his state to
David, his heart slowly blooming with gratitude for the women who have enriched his life.11
Indeed, as the novel progresses, the word heart, which appears some twenty-five times, comes
to signify the differend itself, the trace of ethical feeling and love that remains after rational
systems have failed. Moreover, the novel fulfills Lyotards vision of arts disruptive power to
testify to experiences not always discursively available. Davids new understanding emerges in
his becoming an artist of freedom rather than a scholar of dead masters as he writes a hybridized,
postcolonial opera voicing a middle-aged Teresa Guiccioli, Byrons abandoned lover, singing
herself back to life accompanied by an African banjo and a dogs soulful howls. In this agitated
zone between creative life and abject death, David begins to travel the path back to grace.
Durrant 130.
Durrant 129.
9
10
11
8
Coetzees postcolonial postmodernism is not a reification of surface without depth, but a

reminder that art may still claim an ethical appeal.
The sublime and its related aesthetic, the picturesque, often served as tropes for colonial
power, enabling white settlers to rationalize incomprehensible new environments, reconceive
hostile nature as imbued with the potentiality for cultivation, and valorize their efforts at
domestication.12 The postcolonial, post-apartheid world, however, still wrestles with new
understandings of the relationships between aesthetics, politics, economics, and environmental
issues.13 In his 1988 essay collection, White Writing, Coetzee makes evident his familiarity with
the theory of the sublime as he considers the dual role landscape aesthetics played in South
African colonialism: on the one hand, wilderness was where nature reigned and culture, even
God, failed to control; on the other, it was a place of retreat for purification, as yet incorrupt in a
fallen world.14 Coetzee associates the first with the British separation of the colony from the
barbarian wilderness and the second with Afrikaner isolationism. Yet, for reasons unclear, the
reclamation of the African wilderness in the name of the sublime never occurred.15 However, as
in American literature, landscape and national character were related in early Afrikaans poetry
because the wide spacesthough teeming with animal and human lifeseemed to promise
personal and national freedom. Thus, while it by no means follows that the sublime must be
sympathetic to the politics of expansion, conquest, and grandeur, it is certainly true that the
politics of expansion has uses for the rhetoric of the sublime.16 Coetzee further reflects in his
1997 Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech that, because of the apartheid legacy, South African
literature is a literature in bondage, and even when it is a literature of vastness, it reflects
Gerhard Stilz, Heroic TravellersRomantic Landscapes: The Colonial Sublime in Indian, Australian, and
American Art and Literature, The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience,
1600-2000, ed. Barbara Korte, Hartmut Berghoff, Ralf Schneider, and Christopher Harvie (New York, NY, and
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 856-57.
13
Malcolm Sen, Spatial Justice: The Ecological Imperative and Postcolonial Development, Journal of
Postcolonial Writing 45.4 (2009): 366.
14
J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: The Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988), 49-50.
15
Coetzee, White Writing 51. In a 1997 interview, Coetzee stated that that there are plenty of authentically African
languages in which to talk about the African landscape, namely, African languages. These are not only languages
without a European past but languages of cultures that don't have a scenic tradition. So the uninteresting irony is that
there were languages available, but if the writers in question had been able to move into these languages and make
use of them, they would probably have lost their scenic ambitions as well. Joanna Scott and J.M. Coetzee, Voice
and Trajectory: An Interview with J.M. Coetzee, Salmagundi 114/115 (1997): 97.
16
Coetzee, White Writing 61-2.
12
feelings of entrapment, entrapment in infinitude.17 Coetzee understands not only the ideological
function that landscape aesthetics played in European colonialism, but also that political
domination is not necessarily integral to the experience of the sublime.
David Lurie could be said to shift from the first attitude towards nature as barbarian to the
second, nature as a place of retreat. Yet, as Rita Barnard has elaborated, the novel disallows the
satisfaction of the colonial pastoral mode, in which the white South African can barricade
himself on his farm.18 If the wilderness is a place of contemplation and purification for David, it
is also a place of hardship where he struggles like St. Anthony.19 At the outset the quintessential
white man of culture, the monastic if not celibate college professor, he ends as a man of nature,
practically hermetic, experiencing a humbling self-knowledge in his withdrawal to the bush.
Davids revelation, however, is not direct knowledge of Gods will, but a new sense of
responsibility for his present community of others: women, black Africans, animals, the earthly
immanent. If anything can return David to a state of grace, it must be a renewed appreciation of
his life on earth shared with others, not the life to come.
Coetzees use of the sublime in the novel challenges its metaphysical tradition beginning
with Longinuss first century treatise, which he was familiar with as a student of stylistics during
his doctoral program.20 Well known for his affinities with postmodernism, however, complex,21
recently he has taken issue with Platos suspicion of affect, stating:
I might even go so far as to claim that we are never not in an affective or
affectively inflected statein other words, that Platos ideal of affectless
reasoning is a mirage. The extreme reach of this position would be to say that
reason is always in the service of the passions.
17
J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Atwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
1992), 98.
18
Rita Barnard, J.M. Coetzees Disgrace and the South African Pastoral, Contemporary Literature 44.2 (2003):
199-224. One character in the novel, the German farmer Ettinger, does just that, armed with a Beretta, but his wife is
dead and his children have returned to Germany (Coetzee, Disgrace 100). His isolation promises a sterile legacy in
Africa.
19
Marianne DeKoven has termed this Davids embrace of a Buddheo-Christian renunciation. Marianne DeKoven,
Going to the Dogs in Disgrace, ELH 76.4 (2009): 848.
20
Coetzee, Doubling 151.
21
David Atwell, introduction to Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, by J. M. Coetzee, ed. David Atwell
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), 3. For further discussion of Coetzees relationship to modernism and
postmodernism, see Jane Poyner, introduction to Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual (Athens: Ohio UP,
2006), 9-10; and Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2004), Ch. 1.
If there is no such thing as an affectless state, then the political life not
only is but has to be a more obscure and perilous business than Plato allows it to
be, since the forces at play come not only from without but from within as well,
sometimes without our conscious awareness.22
Davids aesthetic education is an affective and bodily one, discursive reason having failed to
guide his ethical life. The novel is filled with examples of Davids discovering himself and
others through indescribable feelings which only later can be approximately translated into
words. Nor should one conclude that his learning is assisted by divine intervention,
notwithstanding the many theological references that appear in the novel. Coetzee has stated that
he is not a Christian,23 nor is his protagonist.24 Nevertheless, the concept of a secular form of
grace emerges as critical to Davids development.
Edmund Burkes eighteenth-century version emphasized the sublimes emotional
qualities over its rhetorical function. Relating the sublime to terror, he observed that it causes a
temporary lapse of reason.25 The sublime generates fear and respect, but not love, which is
much nearer to contempt than is commonly imagined,26 for we submit to what we admire, but
we love what submits to us.27 Accordingly, while we may caress dogs, we also despise them,
unlike their wild counterpart, the wolf.28 This polarity also carries over into gender, with the
sublime considered masculine and the beautiful feminine. Burkes cynicism resonates in Davids
treatment of women and nature in the early pages of the novel. Only when he loses his power can
he begin to love with the heart. And, as we shall see, Coetzee hardly seems to share Burkes
scorn for domesticated animals. While it may seem that Burkes emphasis on emotion is more
consonant with Coetzees views, he not only appealed to Christian metaphysics29 but also
An Interview with J. M. Coetzee, by Lawrence Rainey, David Attwell, and Benjamin Madden,
Modernism/modernity 18.4 ( 2011): 851.
23
24
25
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam
Phillips (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 53.
26
Burke 61.
27
Burke 100-01.
28
Burke 61.
29
Burke 62-4.
22
demonstrated his race and gender biases.30 It would therefore be problematic to consider Burke
the most apt theorist for understanding Coetzees reconceived sublime.
Immanuel Kant attempted to identify the transcendental grounds for taste and move
beyond Burkes empirical approach. While acknowledging dependent aesthetics, he argued in
Critique of Judgment that a disinterested aesthetics should not be sullied by charm, emotion,
appetite, or other interest.31 The Greek term aesthetics originally meant sense perception, but
in Kants hands the role of the senses was downplayed. Disinterested aesthetics draws its power
from the sensory yet ultimately eschews it in favor of formalism without affect in the case of the
beautiful. Regarding the sublime, Kant posits that an encounter with an object that incites the
feeling of the sublime enables us to realize our a priori supersensible pure practical reason.
However, he also problematically argued that we require a posteriori education to experience the
sublime.32 Moreover, not any education will do, as Lyotard observes: If one does not have the
Idea of freedom and of its law, one cannot experience sublime feeling. 33 Gayatri Spivak more
pointedly argues that, in the Kantian scheme, only Europeans can potentially acquire proper
moral education; those who are naturally uneducable because they are conflated with abject
matter and lack true spiritwomen, non-Europeans, animalscannot develop pure practical
reason.34 For Kant, the iconoclasm of Abrahamic religions constitutes the true expression of
sublimity, while other religious deities only inspire abject ingratiation.35 Hegel follows in the
same vein, identifying an iconoclastic, monotheistic idea of God as the perfection of sublimity.36
All the major philosophers of the sublime through the late nineteenth century regard the
true sublime as grounded in a metaphysical God, entailing the separation of the aesthetic from
the corrupting influences of the world. Such versions of the sublime can neither accommodate an
ecocentric or posthumanist worldview, which considers the natural world an equal partner to the
human, nor immanent religious systems in which the transcendent and material are symbiotic,
30
Burke 103, 130-3.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, ed. and trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 44-51; 6869; 76-78.
32
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck, 3d ed. (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey:
Prentice Hall, 1993), 124.
33
Jean-Franois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kants Critique of Judgment, 23-29, trans.
Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994), 231.
34
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999), 12-13.
35
Kant, Judgment 122.
36
G.F.W. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 1: 324,
336-37; 371; 505; 534.
31
nor Coetzees objection that we are never not in an affectively inflected state and therefore can
never achieve pure practical reason.37 One factor in articulating a postcolonial sublime may then
be to consider whether the sublime must entail an appeal to the metaphysical. Many scholars and
critics have questioned whether our feeling of transcendence in the sublime is not illusory, and
even Kant recognized that the sublime entails a subreption, in which we project our feelings
onto the object observed.38 The sublime without its metaphysical presuppositions might then
entail a more humble cognitive-aesthetic experience, belonging to the family of affects of
astonishment, wonder, awe, and experiences of shock and surprise which not only engage desire
and fear, but may also challenge our habitual ideologies.
The philosopher who offers the most complete reconfiguration of the sublime is Lyotard,
who finds that Kants sublime, and everything in Western thought that had been building
toward itthe Christianity insistent in Longinuss treatise, results in the aesthetic containing
within itself its own disappearance.39 Lyotards complex, multifaceted, and postmodern concept
of the sublime is a vital framework for considering the sublime in a postcolonial context, and in
Coetzees novel. As a materialist philosopher, Lyotard jettisons the metaphysical grounding of
traditional aesthetics, reconfiguring the sublime as the feeling that signals the limits of
representation and reason. Like Heidegger before him,40 Lyotard observes that Kant revised his
arguments so that while originally aesthetics meant sensory intuition, by the time he wrote his
Second Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, sensory intuition was excluded from cognition,
and aesthetics was redefined as the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.41 In other words, Kants
later configuration maps onto Cartesian mind-body dualism. However, Lyotard objects to Kants
disallowing the aesthetic from cognition because, even in Kants work, Any act of thinking is
[] accompanied by a feeling that signals to thought its state. But this state is nothing other
than the feeling that signals it. For thought, to be informed of its state is to feel this stateto be
affected. Therefore, Lyotard argues, the object and the law of reflective judgment are the
37
While Kant does state that pure practical reason is regulative, he also goes to considerable lengths to delegitimize
the role of affect in his critical works, particularly in the Second Critique.
38
Kant, Judgment 114.
39
Lyotard, Lessons 54.
40
Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft, 4th ed. (Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1990), 100-16.
41
Lyotard, Lessons 9, 70; Kant, Judgment 29, 413.
same: feeling.42 Pure aesthetic feeling is an immediate and unconscious sensation,43

subjectively final without the concept of an end.44
The sublime, for Kant, involves the failure of the sensory imagination to comprehend the
totality of the sublime object, followed by the recuperation of that failure by reason. Hence the
sublime demonstrates that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense.45 That is,
since as an aesthetic experience the sublime cannot be reduced to discursive concepts, otherwise
it would no longer be free and disinterested,46 the absolute can only be felt in the sublime, though
we can also think of the idea of the absolute using theoretical reason.47 Yet according to Kant,
reason demands totality, though this is an assumption that he cannot prove. Lyotard argues, It is
all too obvious that this desire for limitlessness is useless, that it should be relegated to inevitable
illusion, that the critique must finally place the sublime close to insanity, showing it to have no
moral value, that in the end the analysis of this feeling must be given over to the aesthetic with
the simple title of appendage, without significance.48 Because of the split between feeling and
cognition, the aesthetic idea cannot be rendered into concepts, while the idea of reason, or the
moral law, cannot be represented intuitively.49 Consequently, the aesthetic and the ethical cannot
be reconciled, resulting in a differend between them.50 This differend cannot be resolved, but it
can be felt: This is the sublime feeling.51
Only through subreption, in which we substitute respect (or fear) for the object with
respect for the unrepresentable idea of our own humanistic vocation as ends in ourselves does the
pleasure of the sublime emerge.52 Thus the sublime does not indicate anything final in nature, but
induces in us the feeling of a finality quite independent of nature.53 This finality is
incompatible with the sensory imagination, and therefore, in the sublime the imagination must
42
Lyotard, Lessons 11-12.

44
45
Kant, Judgment, 106. Emphasis in original.
46
47
Lyotard, Lessons 70. Kant wished to distinguish between the illusions of theoretical reason and the freedom of
practical reason, a distinction that I find unpersuasive.
48
49
50
51
Lyotard, Lessons 233-34.
52
Kant, Judgment, sec. 27; Lyotard, Lessons 69.
53
43
sacrifice itself, and by so doing it sacrifices nature, which is aesthetically sacred, in order to
exalt holy law.54 The Kantian sublime is thus a denaturing aesthetic.55 According to Lyotard,
then, aesthetic theory may be seen as the attempt by which the mind tries to rid itself of words,
of the matter that they are, and finally of matter itself. Happily, this attempt has no chance of
success. One cannot get rid of the Thing.56
Freed of the assumption of the finality of pure reason, Lyotard extends the concept of the
sublime to all things which confound our ability to synthesize them into knowledge. In The
Differend, he reconceives the sublime as the political differend, the non-discursive sign of
heterogeneity. As in aesthetics, a political differend occurs when a conflict cannot be resolved
due to the lack of a common rule, criterion, or discourse. Unlike in a litigation, the victims
wrong cannot (or will not) be acknowledged by the perpetrator: literally, cannot be heard.57
Material and emotional events will always exceed discursive hegemony, but they can be
repressed by political hegemony.58 However, the differend offers the potential, if not the
guarantee, of liberation because it can demand that the witnesses encounter alterity and be
motivated to represent the unrepresentable of the victims silence.59 As I shall demonstrate, these
demands are made of David when he is forced out of his position of privilege and becomes
differend himself.
Finally, Lyotard believes in the power of avant-garde or postmodern art, that is, art which
accesses the sublime differend in order to witness political differends and thus contribute to
justice. Since art, as a sensory aesthetic, can testify to feelings not always discursively available
(even if the art form is a linguistic one), it can potentially disrupt hegemonic ideological and
political structures:
When we have been abandoned by meaning, the artist has a professional duty to
bear witness that there is, to respond to the order to be. The painting becomes
evidence, and it is fitting that it should not offer anything that has to be
54

56
Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Inhuman, trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990),
143.
57
Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1988), 811.
58
Lyotard, Differend 8-13, 144, 157, 181.
59
David Carroll, Rephrasing the Political with Kant and Lyotard: From Aesthetic to Political Judgments,
Diacritics 14.3 (1984): 83.
55
deciphered, still less interpreted. . . . Being announces itself in the imperative. Art
. . . accomplishes an ontological task . . . It must constantly begin to testify anew
to the occurrence by letting the occurrence be.60
The postmodern artist rejects the modernist nostalgia for metaphysical meaning, and bears
witness to the inexpressible; the postmodern sublime is still sublime in the sense that Burke and
Kant described and yet it isnt their sublime anymore.61 Postmodern art may further
defamiliarize the spectators worldview by distorting the form as well as the content. It is that
which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies
itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share
collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable.62 Kants sensus communis is no longer possible
because interrogative works of art offer no stability. 63 Avant-garde art is sublime in its
astonishing and wondrous qualities, which open spectators up to the unfamiliar: traditional
criteria of taste cannot be invoked, and we are prey to unforeseeable feelings such as shock,
admiration, scorn, indifference. In so doing, art does not imitate nature, but instead creates a
world apart . . . in which the monstrous and the formless have their rights because they can be
sublime.64 Art makes us feel, simply, more alive, more ourselves, and so bears witness to our
individuality, our differend, our monstrous formlessness. In the sublime, which threatens us with
death, Lyotard observes that Art, by distancing this menace, procures a pleasure of relief, of
delight. Thanks to art, the soul is returned to the agitated zone between life and death, and this
agitation is its health and its life.65 An art that privileges our singularity may articulate the
differend so that it may be witnessed outside of hegemonic structures.
Like many literary characters before him who venture into colonial or postcolonial spaces
assuming their cultural preconceptions to be universal, David finds that away from the safe
haven of Western hegemony offered by the university and the familiar urban microcosm of Cape
Town his power and identity can no longer be taken for granted. On his daughter Lucys
smallholding, David runs up against what Coetzee characterizes as the problems confronting
60
Lyotard, Inhuman 88.

Lyotard, Inhuman 92-3.
62
63
64
Lyotard, Inhuman 96-7.
65
61
Europeans when they found themselves in terrain not lending itself to being picturesquely
conceived.66 After the rape, it emerges that one of the black perpetrators, Pollux, is a mentally
disturbed adolescent and relative of Petrus, Lucys assistant and co-proprietor. With a Land
Affairs grant, Petrus is expanding his properties and, after the attack, he offers Lucy the
protection of marriage (she would be his third wife) in exchange for her land. Against Davids
wishes, Lucy accepts; both must relinquish their autonomy, economic advantage (David had
helped Lucy buy the farm), and white privilege to Petrus, who represents a changing South
Africa. Although David does not consciously seek a picturesque landscape, nevertheless his
desire for domesticable and attractive landscapes, social milieu, and women is an impediment he
must overcome in his personal growth.
Davids academic specialty, like his identity as a white South African, has predisposed
him to psychological exile. A literary critic expert in Romanticism, Wordsworth and Byron
figure prominently in his identity. Until he moves out to the farm, David demonstrates almost no
interest in what one presumes is his native country and culture, and for the first sixty pages, the
novel might well be set in Britain; Soraya, the part-time prostitute he frequents, lives at
Windsor Mansions.67 Except for the setting of Cape Town, the only sign of a South African
milieu in these pages comes when David attends the rehearsal for the play Sunset at the Globe
Salon, in which his student Melanie Isaacs is performing, and which is set in a hair salon in
Hillsbrow, a neighborhood of Johannesburg which had previously been whites-only but has since
succumbed to urban blight. As a literary scholar, David is strangely oblivious to the plays
commentary on social change in the new South Africa, finding its crude humour and nakedly
political intent hard to endure.68 Cynically, he thinks, Catharsis seems to be the presiding
principle: all the coarse old prejudices brought into the light of day and washed away in gales of
laughter.69 David is skeptical that art can heal the new South Africa, preferring instead to work
on his opera in progress, Byron in Italy, a chamber play about love and death which he thinks of
as a way to leave a legacy as a male, feeling that being a father is too abstract.70 The opera at
66
Coetzee, White Writing 37.

68
69
70
67
this stage reflects Davids solipsistic anxiety of influence and dedication to canonical European
forms rather than emerging from lived experience.
Davids dismissal of the cathartic potential of contemporary theatre is dismaying,
considering the priority the Romantic movement gave to the power of art to liberate and
transform. Even if Luries somewhat jaundiced description of the plays premise no doubt
reflects his view that the process of coming to terms with the legacy of apartheid will be much
more painful and long-drawn-out than is suggested by this cheerful divertissement,71 at least it
represents the voices of the South African present, rather than remaining in thrall, as David is, to
outdated aspects of Western culture. If David dismisses the student play at this point, by the end
of the novel he is writing his own amateurish and sentimental theatrical piece after realizing that
the opera as originally conceived did not come from the heart.72 Coetzee implies his readers
should not be quick to condescend to Melanies play, even if it is only a very small part of the
process of social and political change, lest we find ourselves, like David, wondering later what
we missed.
But David has no time for a postcolonial theatre that features flamboyantly gay 73
beauticians performing a new sexual freedom. Instead, there are two different strains of
Romanticism, one Byronic and one Wordsworthian, guiding his personal ideology, neither of
which he regards as useful tools for navigating post-apartheid South Africa, and both
contributing to his fall into disgrace. As Margot Beard observes, David might lecture his class on
Wordsworth, but he shows no sign of internalizing that vital Romantic concept, the empathetic
imagination.74
First, David fancies himself a Byronic antihero, the Lucifer of the Lara poem, which
he discusses suggestively in the classroom as a veiled come-on to his undergraduate student,
Melanie, with whom he is already having an affair.75 Yet, as Beard observes, David
misunderstands Byron as a mere seducer, and misreads the poem.76 Obviously an abuse of power
Derek Attridge, Age of Bronze, State of Grace: Music and Dogs in Coetzees Disgrace, NOVEL 34.1 (2000): 98121.
72
73
74
Margot Beard, Lessons from the Dead Masters: Wordsworth and Byron in J.M. Coetzees Disgrace, English in
Africa 34.1 (2007): 64.
75
Coetzee, Disgrace 31-2.
76
71
on Davids part, the affair with Melanie is nevertheless ambiguously represented and, as Laura
Wright points out, since Davids voice controls the narrative, his interpretations of Melanies
behavior should be suspect given Davids desire to view Melanie as complicit in their sexual
encounters.77 Since Melanie reports the affair to her parents and the university, it is clear that
the situation disturbed her. David, in his erotic preoccupations, refuses to read the available signs
of her discomfort, failing to imagine himself as other. Before the university tribunal, which he
enters with vanity and self-righteousness,78 he regards himself as sublimely beyond good and
evil, later rationalizing his behavior first in a quasi-metaphysical appeal to the daimonic (I
became a servant of Eros79) and subsequently in an appeal to nature, comparing himself to a
male dog punished for pursuing females.80 Both appeals are, of course, beyond human reason
and a sidestepping of his ethical responsibility. Yet he also thinks, In the whole wretched
business there was something generous that was doing its best to flower.81 Emerging only
slowly and painfully, this generosity is love, which David learns must involve recognition of the
others subjectivity if it is to be more than a destructive misinterpretation of Byronic hedonism.
Turning to the Wordsworthian strain of Romanticism, other problems emerge. Although
David has written a book on Wordsworth,82 when he arrives in the country it is clear that he has
had little to do with nature: The truth is, he has never had much of an eye for rural life, despite
all his reading of Wordsworth. Not much of an eye for anything, except pretty girls; and where
has that got him? Is it too late to educate the eye?83 In his uninspired lecture on Book 6 of The
Prelude, David chooses not to focus on the passages describing the physical environment, but on
the philosophical conundrum underlying the Romantic sublime:
From a bare ridge we also first beheld
Laura Wright, Does he have it in him to be the woman?: The Performance of Displacement in J.M. Coetzees
Disgrace, Ariel 37.4 (2006): 90.
78
79
80
Coetzee, Disgrace 81. Elizabeth Anker writes, By endorsing instinct, experienced by even the small birds,
Lurie attempts to naturalize desire and its claims, deeming it authentic in contrast to the falsifying norms of the law.
Elizabeth S. Anker, Human Rights, Social Justice, and J.M. Coetzees Disgrace, Modern Fiction Studies 54.2
(2008): 245-46. Tom Herron observes that Davids attitude, at this point in the novel, is self-serving: In apparent
contradiction to his professed lack of interest in animals, David is in fact rather fond of describing himself and, more
pointedly, his relationships with women in terms drawn from the animal kingdom. Tom Herron, The Dog-Man:
Becoming Animal in Coetzees Disgrace Twentieth-Century Literature 51.4 (2005): 476.
81
82
83
77
Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved

To have a soulless image on the eye
That had usurped upon a living thought
That never more could be.84
Dwelling aloud on the meaning of usurp, as to intrude or encroach upon, David explains that
usurpation is one of the deeper themes of the Alps sequence. The great archetypes of the mind,
pure ideas, find themselves usurped by mere sense-images.85 Such a statement reveals his
commitment to the transcendental idealism underlying the Romantic sublime, or, to use
Lyotards terminology, nostalgic for a lost metaphysics. For the Romantics, nature was a conduit
for accessing mans teleology as an end in himself, and the sublime constituted the realization of
this end. Although majestic landscapes like Mont Blanc incite sublime feeling, they are not
themselves sublime. Likewise, for David what matters is not the life before us, but the life of the
mind.86
However, Davids views are not as unambiguous as they seem. Continuing with his
lecture, David glosses the following lines from The Prelude, which are not directly cited in
Disgrace:
Imagination! []
[] to my Soul I say
I recognise thy glory. In such strength
Of usurpation, in such visitings
84
Coetzee, Disgrace 88. The lines correspond to lines 452-46 of the version of Wordsworth, The Prelude, edited by
Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), which read slightly differently: That day we first/Beheld the summit of
Mont Blanc, and grieved/To have a soulless image on the eye/Which had usurped upon a living thought/That never
more could be.
85
86
For Kant, disinterested sublime can only take place in raw nature, which lacks a determinate end (Kant,
Judgment, sec. 26). Therefore, wild nature like the Alps qualify as a disinterested sublime, whereas a manmade
structure like the Pyramids could be sublime, but not disinterested. Hence the Romantic interest in wild nature,
which supposedly granted access to mans transcendental supersensible pure reason. However, this appeal to raw
nature does not adequately universalize the Kantian sublime, since, as previously mentioned, experiencing the
sublime requires indoctrination into Western culture. Unlike the beautiful, which arouses feelings of pleasure and
harmony because of the form of the object (Kant, Judgment, sec. 2), the sublime only occurs in the mind because it
arises from the objects apparent (that is, relative to the viewer) violation of form (Kant, Judgment, sec. 23). This is
a problem in Kants theory which cannot be further developed here but which has occupied many commentators.
David, perhaps because less a philosopher than a literary scholar, seems unfamiliar with the problems underlying
Kants argument.
Of awful promise, when the light of sense

Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us
The invisible world, doth Greatness make abode,
There harbours whether we be young or old.
Our destiny, our nature, and our home,
Is with infinitude, and only there [].87
David interprets this as Wordsworth writing about the limits of sensory perception, which
provides access to our invisible world and infinitude as it fades. To David, Wordsworth
seems to be attempting to feel his way towards a balance: not the pure idea, wreathed in clouds,
nor the visual image burned on the retina, overwhelming and disappointing us with its matter-offact clarity, but the sense-image, kept as fleeting as possible, as a means toward stirring or
activating the idea that lies buried more deeply in the soil of memory.88 He constructs a
continuum in which the hybrid sense-image mediates between abstraction and sensory input,
much as the differend signals, non-discursively, the tension between the two extremes, that One
cannot get rid of the Thing. Neither a pure concept of the mind nor an autonomic nervous
response unavailable to self-consciousness, the sense-image takes on functions of both elements,
merging them in a symbolic feeling which can be subjected to discursive interpretation. The
sense-image, essentially, is the third term which enables the two elements to communicate.
Although in Lyotards exegesis of Kant the differend merely negatively signaled the
incompatibility of imagination and reason, in his other works the differend takes on a positive
function as the speech of those silenced by hegemonic discourse. Davids interpretation of
Wordsworth thus suggests that the differend as sense-image becomes a symbol, or mnemonic
device, which resides in the physical body (soil) but becomes consciously known to the mind.
David seems to recognize the inherent failure of the mind-body dichotomy and Kantian
aesthetics when he says, The question is not, How can we keep the imagination pure, protected
from the onslaughts of reality? The question has to be, can we find a way for the two to
coexist?89 As that which signals the moment when the aesthetic and the ethical fail to
87
The Prelude in Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), lns. 525-39. Note
that Coetzee cites line 599 from an unknown edition; the text offered above seems to offer the correct match.
88
89
harmonize, the sublime differend offers an opportunity for growth. But because it manifests as a
feeling rather than a discursive thought, the subject must be willing to reflect on what may be
learned: that is, one must explore the origin and nature of the feeling, and then translate those
explorations into language for conscious thought. To put this another way, although a subject
may experience feelings and discursive thoughts differently, psychology tells us that both
categories of experience may stem from the same cause. Current studies in cognitive
neuroscience and clinical psychology have also jettisoned the Cartesian mind-body split in favor
of more complex, if yet incomplete, understandings of how the mind and body interrelate. 90
Yet despite his interpreting the letter of the poem, David is unable to live its spirit, his
heart being dead. As he tells Bev Shaw later, his vocation was scholarship rather than teaching:
Certainly I never aspired to teach people how to live. I was what used to be a scholar. I wrote
books about dead people. That was where my heart was. I taught only to make a living. 91 His
failure to realize the significance of his insight is evidenced by his statement that pure ideas are
usurped by mere sense-images.92 Thus, he tells the bored students that if one seeks those
revelatory Wordsworthian moments, whether in the Drakensberg or Table Mountain in Cape
Town, one must know that they will not come unless the eye is half turned toward the great
archetypes of the imagination we carry within us.93 Davids attempt to transfer the Romantic
sublime to an African landscape fails to engage his students because they do not identify with the
tradition of the English poets, though this does not necessarily mean they cannot experience
similar moments of inspiration. At this point, like Kant, David assumes a shared Western
ideology as a precondition for experiencing the sublime. Only after his aesthetic education in the
bush does David realize his concern with the past had consigned his emotional life to the dead
zones: So much for the poets, so much for the dead masters. Who have not, he must say, guided
him well. Aliter, to whom he has not listened well.94 Davids slow learning is evidenced by his
See Antonio Damasio, Descartess Error (1994) (New York: Vintage, 2006); Damasio, The Feeling of What
Happens: Body, Emotion and The Making of Consciousness (New York: Vintage, 2000); and Timothy D. Wilson,
Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard, 2002).
91
Coetzee, Disgrace 162. Alice Brittan observes that David and Lucy often describe themselves as dead. Alice
Brittan, Death and J.M. Coetzees Disgrace, Contemporary Literature 51.3 (2010): 487.
92
93
94
90
internal dialogue shifting from blaming the dead masters to responsibility for having been not
only been a poor teacher but a poor student.
His separation of scholarship from teachingabstract ideas from living relationships
reflects the schism between his aesthetics and ethics. Such compartmentalization has not only
alienated him from himself, but made it easier for him to abdicate his ethical responsibilities with
regard to his students in particular and women in general. His failure to imagine himself as
other is on display during his lecture when he digresses from Wordsworths text to an analogy
about love, intended as a veiled come-on to Melanie:
Like being in love, he says. If you were blind you would hardly have fallen in
love in the first place. But now, do you truly wish to see the beloved in the cold
clarity of the visual apparatus? It may be in your better interest to throw a veil
over the gaze, so as to keep her alive in her archetypal, goddesslike form.95
David misses the irony that he has used his idealized aesthetics to justify his desire to usurp
upon Melanie sexually. If it is in Davids better interests as seducer to see Melanie as
archetypal, such a reification is hardly in hers. As with Kants disinterested aesthetics, David
observes that sensory intuition is needed to initiate attraction, but the flawed truth of embodied
existence must be ignored if one wants to keep the fantasy alive. If sense-images threaten the
reassurance of pure ideas then, David argues, throw the veil of subreption over them. The
egotistical sublime, rather than enabling the yearned-for freedom, forecloses ethical action.
Freedom, Lyotard and Coetzee counter, is instead expressed in the differend, the irreconcilable
supplement that is the sign of irritation, like the pearl in the oyster. David thus fails as a teacher
who, as the gatekeeper to institutional knowledge, should be providing his students with tools to
negotiate a brave new world by mediating past and present, rather than asking them to conform
to his stale preferences.
Until late in the novel, David puts a premium on female beauty in its idealized, traditional
form. If the woman is beautiful, as in the case of Melanie or Soraya, he regards her beauty as
belonging not to her but to the spectator. He tells Melanie, a womans beauty does not belong to
her alone. It is part of the beauty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.96
Although he admits to himself that his words are seductive, he also half-believes them, thinking,
95
96

She does not own herself. Beauty does not own itself.97 David seems to apply Kants notion of
disinterested aesthetic judgment to an individual person, yet Kant did not regard human beauty
as disinterested;98 rather, he admits we derive an average standard idea of the beautiful
resulting from the congruence of many empirical examples which are, necessarily, culturally
determined.99 In rationalizing Melanies beauty as not integral to her subjectivity, David
fetishizes her beauty to justify his exploitation of her vulnerability as his student. Moreover, as if
others responses to her appearance could not possibly be of interest to her, he does not ask
Melanie for her opinion.
Ironically, David should be sensitive to the way ones physical beauty can impact ones
social interactions. Having grown up in the company of women, he replaced his maternal
connections with mistresses, wives, a daughter; the novel never provides evidence of significant
relationships with living men. But Davids life has also been determined by his physical
appearance. While in his prime, his dependence on womens company made him a lover of
women and, to an extent, a womanizer. With his height, his good bones, his olive skin, his
flowing hair, he could always count on a degree of magnetism.100 Like a nerdy Dionysus, for
decades he lived in the seducers warm glow of admiration, until one day Without warning his
powers fled. [.] Overnight he became a ghost.101 No longer able to compel women to his bed
through sheer magnetism, he has to buy them in an anxious flurry of promiscuity.102 Arguably,
Davids predation on a much younger female student and refusal to take ethical responsibility for
his actions signifies a midlife rebellion against aging and mortality. His ex-wife Rosalind tells
him he was always A great deceiver and a great self-deceiver,103 and he admits to himself
that He has never been given to lingering involvements.104 Like Lucifer in the Lara poem,
David acts not on principle but on impulse, and the source of his impulses is dark to him.105
97

Kant, Judgment 77.
99
Kant, Judgment 82. Unlike free beauty which does not presuppose a concept, dependent beauty does (77-78).
However, Kant continues to distinguish the standard idea of the beautiful from the ideal of the beautiful, which
consists in the expression of the moral (83).
100
101
102
103
104
Coetzee, Disgrace 190..
105
98
Confusing the egotistical sublime with love which grants the beloved their freedom, David
misunderstands his own emotions.
Coetzee contrasts the young beauty and relative powerlessness of Melanie and Soraya 106
with the age and unattractiveness of Bev Shaw, who runs an animal clinic near Lucys farm.
David is repulsed by Bevs lack of beauty, considering her dumpy, 107 chinless, and veiny.108
Although he acknowledges his prejudices, he doesnt care enough to change them: He does not
like women who make no effort to be attractive. It is a resistance he has had to Lucys friends
before.109 Bevs kitschy home dcor, and husband Bill, are similarly devoid of good taste.110
Surrounded by symbols of animals, Bev functions as a middle-aged shamanic woman who
assists David on his path to discovering a de-exoticized, de-eroticized new order that reminds
us we are all animal bodies, as Marianne DeKoven points out.111 But David can only begin to
understand this new order when his white male, middle-class privileges have been forcibly
removed.
In his retreat to the wilderness during the second half of Disgrace, David is progressively
forced to identify with the others of the dominant Western culture: women, black men,
animals.112 By becoming an other, stripped of the veil of subreption, David begins to learn what
numerous critics have identified as sympathetic imagination.113 Some days after his arrival,
Lucy suggests David volunteer at the clinic, where Bev heals and euthanizes the unwanted and
sick, mostly dogs. In a country where people suffer enormously, On the list of the nations
106
Elleke Boehmer argues that in the cases of Melanie and Lucy, neither obtains justice or admission of guilt, and
that past crimes are expiated only through private ritual. Elleke Boehmer, Not Saying Sorry, Not Speaking Pain.
Gender Implications in Disgrace, Interventions 4.3 (2002): 344. However, while the resolutions Coetzee offers
may be dissatisfying, it would be an overstatement to say that no efforts at justice or apology are presented.
Although David victimizes both Soraya and Melanie, neither is silenced. When David tracks down Sorayas
personal telephone number to attempt a last meeting, she accuses him of harassing her in her own home and
demands he never call her there again (Coetzee, Disgrace 9-10). Melanie, of course, has reported their relationship
to her parents and the university authorities, who discipline and then fire him. The police are unsuccessful in
apprehending the perpetrators of the attack on Lucy and David. Deeply problematic, of course, is Lucys
capitulation to the black patriarchy offered by Petrus, though it is one she chooses.
107
108
109
110
111
Marianne DeKoven, Going to the Dogs in Disgrace, ELH 76.4 (2009): 850-53.
112
Very few black African women appear in the novel, and then only as background figures, such as Petruss young
wife. David has little interaction with black women, since Melanie and Soraya are not black but colored or Middle
Eastern. The novel suggests that oppression is experienced differently based on ones gender as well as race.
113
See, for example, Beard 64, Durrant 122, and Mike Marais, J.M. Coetzees Disgrace and the Task of the
Imagination, Journal of Modern Literature 29.2 (2006): 76.
priorities, animals come nowhere.114 When Lucy perceives that he would like her to dedicate
herself to more important things, she says that Bev and Bill are not going to lead me to a higher
life, and the reason is, there is no higher life.115 David superficially assents, only to reveal his
internalization of Western metaphysics: The Church Fathers had a long debate about [animals]
and decided they didnt have proper souls. While David is sure humans have souls, Lucy
responds that she isnt sure she has a soul or would know one if she saw one.116
In The Lives of Animals (1999), Coetzee pursued the question of animal souls more
didactically. His protagonist, Elizabeth Costello, argues for animal rights against the Western
notion that God is a God of reason. Animals, lacking reason, are thinglike, while man is
godlike.117 If animals have no souls or reason, they cannot make the same ethical claim on us
as humans do. She remarks, Even Kant does not pursue, with regard to animals, the
implications of his intuition that reason may not be the being of the universe but on the contrary
merely the being of the human brain.118 Costello instead sees reason as the being of a certain
spectrum of human thinking,119 a vast tautology which has no motive to dethrone itself.120
Against the Cartesian privileging of discursive cognition, Costello posits fullness,
embodiedness [] the sensationa heavily affective sensationof being a body with limbs that
have extension in space, of being alive to the world.121 Derrida writes that Western philosophers
have agreed that the animal is without language. Or, more precisely, unable to respond, to
respond with a response that could be precisely and rigorously distinguished from a reaction, the
animal is without the right and power to respond and hence without many other things that
114
Coetzee, Disgrace 73. The emphasis on animal welfare in the face of the overwhelming problems of human
suffering in South African has not gone without comment. While some critics find fault with David caring for dogs
rather than people, Tom Herron has pointed out that while there is a risk that this may divert attention away from
humans, we should be open to the possibility of exploring a relationship between the two spheres of suffering
(474). See also Nicole Shukin on how Disgrace responds to a number of areas neglected by South Africas Truth
and Reconciliation Commission, including the plight of animals. Nichole Shukin, Tense Animals: On Other
Species of Pastoral Power, CR: The New Centennial Review 11.2 (2011): 158-59.
115
116
Coetzee, Disgrace 78. For further discussion, see Louis Tremaine, The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the
Work of J.M. Coetzee. Contemporary Literature 44.4 (2003): 587-612.
117
J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutman (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1999), 23.
118
Coetzee, Lives of Animals 23.
119
120
121
would be the property of man.122 By implication, animals are differends, not for lack of a voice,
but for lack of human speech. Davids aesthetic education can only begin when his embodied
experience exceeds his ability to rationalize it, and when he loses his privilege of being heard,
becoming differend. Once the master of language who commanded attention from the lectern, his
voice has been rendered a reaction. The attack that leaves him a scarred remnant of his former
self, and his caring for the dogs, an activity redolent with repugnant smells, disgusting bodily
conditions, and the shame of death,123 together break through Davids monadic monasticism,
forcing him into experiences that daily defy the powers of language to describe them.
Despite his reservations, David begins volunteering, a choice that has profound
repercussions. He begins to understand Bevs clinic not as a hospital but a hospice, and Bev as
not a veterinarian but a priestess, comparing her to St. Hubert, the patron saint of dogs and
hunters.124 According to one version of the legend, St. Hubert was a wealthy aristocrat who
retreated to the forest to hunt after his wife died in childbirth. When a hart he is hunting
confronts him, Hubert has a mystical vision that a crucifix stands between its antlers, and hears a
voice telling him, "unless thou turnest to the Lord, and leadest an holy life, thou shalt quickly go
down into hell.125 If women and dogs are similarly persecuted in Disgrace, then Melanie is the
hart (or heart) that confronts David as Luciferian Hubert. But, despite Davids identification of
Bev as St. Hubert, it is David who patterns himself after the hermit saint: having said farewell
to the city, what do I find myself doing in the wilderness? Doctoring dogs.126 The predatory
libertine retreats to Wordsworthian nature to heal himself by healing the most abject of creatures
and thus learn the flesh is holy.127 Romanticism here turns against what David mistakenly
considered Romanticism as the former hunter of women becomes like a dog.
The dogs, he realizes, mainly suffer from their own fertilityoverpopulationand the
people who bring them to the clinic simply want them removed without much ado:
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 400.
Tremaine, Embodied Soul, 598-99. For further discussion of Derrida in relation to Disgrace and The Lives of
Animals, see Herron, and Durrant.
124
125
Alban Butler and Paul Burns, Butlers Lives of the Saints: November, ed. Sarah Fawcett Thomas, rev. ed.
(Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), 25.
126
127
The journey of the hermit into the wilderness is a standard one in saints lives, and there is a tradition of miracle
stories where a hermit saint rescues an animal from a hunter nobleman, which Dominic Alexander has labelled the
hermit and hunter topos (2). These tales also often involve the saints colonisation and control of animals (160).
Dominic Alexander, Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2008).
122
123
When people bring a dog in they do not say straight out, I have brought you this
dog to kill, but that is what is expected: that they will dispose of it, make it
disappear, dispatch it to oblivion. What is being asked for is, in fact, Lsung
(German always to hand with an appropriately blank abstraction): sublimation, as
alcohol is sublimed from water, leaving no residue, no aftertaste.128
Sublimation and sublime originate from the same root; since the metaphysical grounding of the
sublime is under erasure in the novel, Coetzee suggests that the sublime has only ever been
sublimation. For the dogs do not disappear without an aftertaste. Although David had previously
disapproved of cruelty in an abstract way, his pity and compassion come forth after the dogs
are dead. He finds himself unaccountably incinerating the euthanized dogs at the dump because
he does not want the workmen to break up the dogs rigor mortis with shovels or to leave their
carcasses over the weekend.129 He has become a dog-man: a dog undertaker; a dog
psychopomp; a harijan, and asks himself why he has taken on this job: For himself, then? For
his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more
convenient shape for processing, and thinks, There must be other, more productive ways of
giving oneself to the world, or to an idea of the world.130 But this statement is made long before
the conclusion of the novel and thus is only one step in his education. Although some critics, like
Lucy Graham, argue that Davids service to the dogs is not redemptive in itself, others like Laura
Wright and Tom Herron131 see a deeper connection between the plight of the dogs and Davids
education in experiencing imaginatively what it means to be other. Since ideas of the world are
what have brought about his downfall, they are obviously not where he should direct his
attention. David never finds a more productive way because there is none.
It is through what Herron describes as becoming animal132becoming differendthat
David discovers that this way of giving oneself to the world can yield fulfillment. The day after
the assault, David feels shaken to the core, physically and metaphysically. He suffers light but
disfiguring facial burns, which Bev cleans and dresses for weeks. As DeKoven observes, On the
way to leaving {his sexual predator} self behind, Lurie must suffer the utter humiliation of
128

130
131
Wright 98; Herron 474.
132
Herron 471.
129
becoming physically ludicrous. [.] [H]e is repulsive, just as Bev Shaw has been to him.133
Previously, at the clinic, he had helped her care for a male goat that had been attacked by dogs
and wounded in the scrotum, which is now swollen and infested with maggots. Bev comforts the
goat, kneeling next to him and rubbing his throat with her head as she whispers What do you
say, my friend [.] What do you say? Is it enough? The goat stands stock still as if hypnotized.
Bev Shaw continues to stroke him with her head. She seems to have lapsed into a trance of her
own.134 When she fails to convince the goats owner to allow her to put the goat down
painlessly, the goat hears the accents of defeat in her voice and bucks violently. 135 The goat
seems to feel and hear Bevs desire to comfort him, not only reacting but responding. David
suggests to Bev that goats have a primordial understanding that they are meant for slaughter and
death, but Bev says, I dont think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being
escorted.136 Now himself under her care, David wonders if the sense of peace he experiences
was shared by the goat.137 As a vulnerable, defeated satyr, emasculated by the black men whom
he imagines as dogs,138 David identifies with the wounded male goat.139
Reduced to a state of physical dependence, David needs Bev as much as the animals do.
As a result of these unspoken physical intimacies and their work with animals, the boundaries
between them are lowered and they have an affair. He acknowledges that he must stop thinking
of Bev as poor, for if she is poor, he is bankrupt.140 Allowing his vulnerability to emerge, he
also relinquishes his fetishizing of female beauty, since hitherto Bevs ugliness disqualified her
as a sexual candidate not worthy of his charms. After the attack he thinks, Do I have to change?
Do I have to become like Bev Shaw?141 David only begins to develop sympathetic imagination
for others when physical and emotional trauma makes him other to himself. His aesthetic
education involves the new understanding that aesthetics and ethics are not mutually exclusive as
he had once imagined. By reifying womens beauty, he rationalized their dehumanization for his
133
DeKoven 864.
135
136
137
138
139
David also identifies himself as a scapegoat, but one whose function has been lost with the religious power of the
original ritual. A few moments later they encounter their three attackers on the road. Coetzee, Disgrace 91.
140
141
134
selfish purposes. In the same way, European landscape aesthetics mistakenly assumed that the
sublime and pastoral were universal aesthetics which could be seamlessly transposed onto new
worlds and peoples. Aesthetics became both a ruse for colonial politics and a veil which hid their
violence. And similarly, Coetzee suggests, the language of human as not-animal142 has served
as both a ruse and a veil to justify human mistreatment of animals as well as of people.
David takes another step in his learning when he visits Melanies family while Melanie
herself is in Cape Town. In an act of extraordinary generosity, Melanies father, Mr. Isaacs, a
middle-school principal, invites David to his home for an awkward dinner. Their conversation
takes on a theological tone. Wanting to speak his heart, David realizes he doesnt know what is
on his heart.143 He clumsily tries to explain that Melanie lit a flame inside him, the kind that
ancient peoples worshipped as a flame-god,144 much like his earlier justification that Eros had
urged him on. The evening coming to a close, David finally asks for Mr. Isaacss pardon. He
does not receive one; instead, Mr. Isaacs responds that the question is not whether David is sorry,
but rather, The question is, what does God want from you, besides being very sorry?145
David explains he is a non-believer, but that on his own terms he has been sunk into a possibly
irretrievable state of disgrace, which he has accepted. When asked if he thinks God would find
that sufficient penance, Mr. Isaacs replies that since David doesnt pray, God must find his own
way of telling him. He asks David why he is there, and who he has really come to speak to;
David does not reply, but pays obeisance to Mrs. Isaacs and Desiree, Melanies sister, kneeling
before them and touching his head to the floor, and thanking them for their kindness and their
meal.146 Although this private ritual may be unsatisfying to some,147 nevertheless Davids gesture
indicates a measure of contrition.
Yet David continues to think his trials are meant to punish an old man for trying to
monopolize the young females of the species.148 He goes to one of Melanies performances and,
watching her on stage, has a revelation that his life has been enriched by all the women he has
known: Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness. Where do
Derrida, The Animal 400.
144
145
146
147
See Boehmer 344.
148
142
143
moments like this come from? Hypnagogic, no doubt; but what does that explain? If he is being
led, then what god is doing the leading?149 Melanies boyfriend drives him away before he can
speak to her and, emotionally shaken, he rents a young prostitute. The sex calms his nerves, and
he thinks he is Not a bad man, but not a good one either.150 Deprived of the opportunity to
speak with Melanie and, one hopes, apologize to her, Davids clumsy love is again redirected
towards sexual exploitation, though his emotions burst forth in an epiphanic realization. If a god
is leading him, it is one whose messages are coded into non-discursive signs that David must
interpret through feeling rather than reason.
The heart resurfaces with increasing frequency as the sign of the differend and as
language, ideas, theories, and abstractions continue to be problematized throughout the novel.
After the assault, He has a sense that, inside him, a vital organ has been bruised, abused
perhaps even his heart.151 He feels raped and brutalized, his pleasure in living snuffed
out.152 Although he tries to understand the attack as the product of the competition for resources
in which women, like other status objects such as cars and shoes, circulate in a vast system, the
comforts of theory153 fail to offer solace. Language cannot rationalize his trauma: War,
atrocity: every word with which one tries to wrap up this day, the day swallows down its black
throat.154 Lucy also refuses to tell him about the rape. As with Melanie, David is refused access
to her story and is thrown back onto the limited resources of his imagination. By having to
exercise itself, his sympathetic imagination increases its negative capability.
Struggling to understand what happened, he has several conversations with Lucy about
the rape. Against Davids advice that she leave to avoid another potential attack, Lucy replies
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?155 To this she adds that nothing surprises her when it comes to men and sex: Maybe,
149

151
152
153
154
155
150
for men, hating the woman makes sex more exciting. You are a man, you ought to know.156
She compares the sex act to Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards, leaving the body behind
covered in blooddoesnt it feel like murder, like getting away with murder?157 Davids
response is equivocal: perhaps, sometimes, for some men.158 Lucy says the men do not want her
for slavery, but for subjection,159 and leaving the farm would constitute defeat for her.160 As has
been widely observed, the correlation to his own behavior towards women has hitherto escaped
David. While his behavior was not as physically violent, it was emotionally violent and also
aimed at the womens subjection. David realizes that among Byrons many conquests there
were no doubt those who called it rape.161 He imagines himself into Lucys point of view during
the attack, frightened to death for the mens sadistic pleasure. Go on, call your dogs! No
dogs! Then let us show you dogs! he imagines them saying to her.162 He can imagine himself as
the men, he realizes, but The question is, does he have it in him to be the woman?163 The other
question underlying the novel is Does he have it in him to be the dog? To achieve selfknowledge, David must recognize himself in the rapists as dog, but also, in terms of the
novels critique of Western idealism, as mortal and immanent as the dogs who also deserve love
and empathy.
When David learns that Lucy is pregnant as a result of the rape and intends to keep the
child, he is reduced to weeping despair that this will be his legacy. Adding insult to injury,
Pollux, the boy who had participated in the attack, is living with Petrus as his family member.
Petrus tells David to put the past behind him and offers a solution: if Pollux cannot marry Lucy
because he is too young, Petrus himself will in order to protect her,164 a plan that he has been
considering for some time. Lucy, to Davids horror, is amenable to this situation, provided she
keep the house as her private domain. Petrus, she explains, is after the land, which is her
dowry.165 David is humiliated, but for Lucy, it may be good To start at ground level. With
156

158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
157
nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no
dignity, that is, like a dog.166 In his Jerusalem Prize Speech, Coetzee observed that
The veiled unfreedom of the white man in South Africa has always made itself
felt most keenly when, stepping down a moment from his lonely throne, giving in
to a wholly human and understandable yearning for fraternity with the people
among whom he lives, he has discovered with a shock that fraternity by itself is
not to be had, no matter how compellingly felt the impulse on both sides.
Fraternity ineluctably comes in a package with liberty and equality. The vain and
essentially sentimental yearning to have fraternity without paying for it.167
The very lowest price to be paid, he says, is the destruction of the unnatural structures of power
that define the South African state.168 Having stepped down from his throne, David learns that
being a neighbor rather than a master169 may require unpleasant compromises. If David exhibits
the deformed inner life resulting from apartheid, then Lucy may represent the voluntary
redistribution of land and economic wealth bypassed by the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, even if she says she is not going back to the farm for the sake of an idea.170 If
David is forced to change, Lucy is what Petrus describes as forward-thinking,171 though since
her new situation has also been forced, Elleke Boehmer objects that, for Lucy, sympathy for the
other must mean to live in inevitable disgrace.172 However, I would argue that Davids
identification with others suffering has been far from willing, and that Lucy, by retaining control
of her story and refusing to allow others to interpret her experience for her,173 and by choosing to
remain in South Africa rather than escape to Holland (a choice not available to most of her
fellow citizens), retains her subjectivity. If it is true that White dominance and the overcoming
of white dominance are both figured as involving the subjection of the female body, as part of a
166

168
169
170
171
172
Boehmer 349-50.
173
Coetzee elsewhere asked, [Is] representation to be so robbed of power by the endlessly skeptical processes of
textualization that those represented in/by the textthe feminine subject, the colonial subjectare to have no power
either? Coetzee, Doubling 248.
167
long history of female exploitation of which the narrative takes note,174 then Coetzee seems
loath to present a more optimistic scenario. One might imagine him responding that until women
are also free South Africa will remain in bondage.
Lucys child is far from the first to be born of rape, and to love it, she will have to do so
despite its being born of suffering. In South Africa, Coetzee has written elsewhere, it is not
possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the body. [.] It is not that one
grants the authority of the suffering body: the suffering body takes this authority: that is its
power.175 Repeatedly throughout Disgrace, the body imposes itself on the will. The urges of
sexual desire, the feelings of despair at being physically degraded, the substitution of gesture for
speech, the overwhelming number of hyperproductive dogs, the inability to adapt to farmwork, a
child born of violencerepeatedly the bodies in this world make their wordless yet meaningful
demands. Indeed, one way to understand Lucys decision to carry the child rather than abort it is
as respect for the body and its suffering.
And if, as Coetzee writes in the Jerusalem Prize Speech, At the heart of the unfreedom
of the hereditary masters of South Africa is a failure of love,176 and that the origins of antimiscegenation laws lay in denial of an unacknowledgeable desire to embrace Africa, embrace
the body of Africa; and fear of being embraced in turn by Africa,177 the self-righteousness of
Davids apartheid heritage comes to the surface, despite a lifetime of cultural training, when one
day he attacks Pollux for peeping at Lucy through a window. Although ashamed of himself, he
lacks self-control: Something about Pollux sends him into a rage: his ugly opaque little eyes, his
insolence, but also the thought that like a weed has been allowed to tangle his roots with Lucy
and Lucys existence. . . . Lucy may be able to bend to the tempest; he cannot, not without
honour.178 Davids colonialist ideology continues to direct his view of Pollux as not only a
disturbed adolescent, but also as an ugly insolent weed lacking aesthetic appeal, domestic
utility, or a properly deferential attitude. As one of the possible fathers of his grandchild, Pollux
has polluted his racial legacy. In Apartheid Thinking, Coetzee discusses one of the architects
of apartheid, Geoffrey Cronj, who implied that Afrikaner mothers, even more than fathers,
174
Boehmer 344.
176
177
178
175
functioned as protectors of blood-purity. Bastard children pose a threat because they might
become a secret weakening force from within society.179 Apartheid, like David, from the
beginning was confusion, a confusion it displaced wildly around itself. It cannot be understood
merely by its externalities, but will remain a mystery as long as it is not approached in the lair
of the heart.180 Davids anxiety over the mixing of races, resulting from mixed living181 and
Too many in a small space,182 will only be alleviated through his future struggle to love and
support Lucy and his grandchild. If he cannot overcome his rage, however, David at least is now
aware of his failings, but his next step will be to relinquish the concept of honor.
On his trip back to Cape Town, David finds his former life in ruins. At loose ends, he
takes up his abandoned opera. After his rural sojourn, however, he feels that the project has not
come from the heart183 and decides to recast Teresa in middle-age, long abandoned by the
now-deceased Byron. This Teresa is plain, dull, and forlorn, no longer the romantic heroine.
Reworking the opera alone in his ruined home, David begins to explore the meaning of love:
Can he find it in his heart to love this plain, ordinary woman? Can he love her enough to write
music for her? If he cannot, what is left of him?184 Finding the piano too rich a sound, he
discovers in the attic, among Lucys childhood toys, an African banjo he had bought for her on
the street. The banjo seems appropriate for the comic mood, rather than elegiac or tragic, that the
opera has now taken on. Further, it expresses the differend David feels between longing for
eternity and the reality of mortality: he is held in the music itself, in the flat, tinny slap of the
banjo strings, the voice that strains to soar away from the ludicrous instrument but is continually
reined back, like a fish on a line. So this is art, he thinks, and this is how it does its work! How
strange! How fascinating!185 Teaching David to relinquish vanity and pride in favor of truth and
life, Teresa allows him to embrace his disgrace and humiliations as part of his singular
personhood, and so emerges as a symbol of his becoming other: becoming his vulnerable,
material, earthly, mortal, ugly, animal self. As Margot Beard observes, Wordsworth linked
mortality and creativity, previously not well understood by David, but now As Lurie falteringly
179
Coetzee, Giving Offense 164.

181
182
183
184
185
180
learns humility and the need to love the unloveable, so the blas Romantic scholar becomes the
incipient artist.186 Giving up his ambitions to produce a generically correct work, Davids opera
reworks the Romantic idea that through artistic creation we renew our spirit, but only if the
inspiration originates from engagement with embodied living rather than ossified ways of seeing.
The lyric impulse in him may not be dead, but after decades of starvation it can crawl forth
from its cave only pinched, stunted, deformed. [.] His hopes must be more temperate: that
somewhere from amidst the welter of sound there will dart up, like a bird, a single authentic note
of immortal longing.187 As an art in bondage, the opera expresses Davids feelings of
entrapment in infinitude. Yet the act of making art is itself the sign of life, the call of freedom,
the note of longing.
In the closing pages of the novel, David divides his time between work at the clinic and
on the opera. One lame dog in particular forms a bond with him. Though he refuses to give it a
name (Bev calls it Driepoot, Dutch for tripod) or think of it as his, nevertheless, he is
sensible of a generous affection streaming out toward him from the dog. Arbitrarily,
unconditionally, he has been adopted; the dog would die for him, he knows.188 The dog seems
to love the sound of the banjo: Would he dare to do that: bring a dog into the piece, allow it to
loose its own lament to the heavens between the strophes of lovelorn Teresas? Why not? Surely,
in a work that will never be performed, all things are permitted.189 Tom Herron observes that,
following Derridas scheme, David moves from a philosophical position on animals to the
understanding articulated by poets or artists [] who admit taking upon themselves the address
of an animal that addresses them. As the generic operatic qualities fade away, he continues,
animals cease to be merely ornamental and come to actually constitute its form.190 Having
already recognized that in post-apartheid South Africa knowledge of Sotho and Xhosa will be
more essential than European languages,191 David incorporates the dogs speech as a
demonstration that he has relinquished control of the master narrative. In mourning his lost self
and the South Africa he knew, David becomes more South African than he was, producing a
186
Beard 65.
188
189
190
Herron 485.
191
Coetzee, Disgrace 76, 114.
187
postcolonial, hybridized art form which melds European and African, child and adult, comedy
and tragedy, human and animal. As Derek Attridge observes, Instead of an aesthetics of the
static and essential, preserving its form across time and cultural differences, Coetzees fiction
opens the possibility of an ethics of unique acts, rooted always in the here and now, yet
acknowledging a deep responsibility to the others of elsewhere, of the past, of the future.192
Looking back, David may find the Sunset at the Globe Salon more poignant than cloying.
Reclaiming the voices of the woman and the dog from their silence as differend, David
serves as a witness who attempts, however inadequately, to represent their unrepresentability.
The voices of Teresa and the dog are the signs of the mad, sublime, illusion of freedom. Despite
other assertions in the novel about the ineptitude of art, Davids creation suggests that although
art cannot save us from death, nor substitute for political action, it can return us to life. It is not
that dead poets are useless, but rather that our understanding of them should enhance our present
living experience; they are a means, not an end, to personal and political growth. Unlike David,
and like Melanie, we should take our dead poets, our teachers, to heart.193 By embracing his
mortality, imperfections, and weaknesses, David sings himself back to life, Orpheus to his own
Eurydice. Art becomes evidence of our being, obdurate as the body.
Although David moves away from the farm to avoid conflict, he returns one day to watch
Lucy at work in her flower garden, laboring in the field like a peasant. Her solidity and peace
remind him that she will outlast him, bringing another life into existence, as his own fades away
into oblivion.194 The scene coalesces into a moment of grace, a Wordsworthian spot of time:
The wind drops. There is a moment of utter stillness which he would wish
prolonged forever: the gentle sun, the stillness of mid-afternoon, bees busy in a
field of flowers; and at the centre of the picture a young woman, das ewig
Weibliche, lightly pregnant, in a straw sunhat. A scene ready-made for a Sargent
or a Bonnard. City boys like him; but even city boys can recognize beauty when
they see it, can have their breath taken away.
192
Attridge, Ethics of Reading 8.

194
193
The truth is, he has never had much of an eye for rural life, despite all his
reading of Wordsworth. Not much of an eye for anything, except pretty girls; and
where has that got him? It is too late to educate the eye?195
Although as Rita Barnard points out, Davids discourse remains masculine, scenic, and
European,196 the passage also suggests his increasingly critical self-consciousness.
Davids eye and heart, aesthetics and ethics, are being re-educated. No longer
solipsistically seeing others as reflections of himself, he has learned not only to listen to the
women in his life with humility, but to live fully in the moment with the dogs he escorts to death:
He has learned by now, from her, to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing,
giving it what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name: love.197 Davids attitude
towards animal life has changed; the process of reviving his heart has involved recognizing that
animals, too, might have souls,198 experience love, and fear the solitude of death. To escort
Driepoot to death and cremate his remains, then, will be little enough, less than little:
nothing.199 The dog, when he comes to fetch him, loves him in his doggish way, licking his
cheeks, his lips, his ears.200 Yes, he says to Bev Shaw, I am giving him up.201 His giving
up of the dog at the novels close is also a giving up of his own youth, beauty, and vigor and an
admission of his own animal mortality. Louis Tremaine rightly argues that the dog is not a sign
of something other than itself, such as rapists or Davids spiritual life, but rather offers no
transformational symbol. Instead, David acquiesces to the fact that his salvation can reside in no
one and nothing beyond his own animal being. Davids giving up, he posits, is not a defeat
but a liberation from the delusional idea that places body apart from soul, and locates salvation in
art, rather than art being that which points to where salvation may lie. 202 However, Tremaine
overlooks the fact that this giving up is not necessarily a liberation for Driepoot. Surely the
lame dog, like the goat or the Persian sheep meant for slaughter, doesnt want to die, nor is it
necessary that he die. No good reason is provided for the dogs death, and in the terms the novel
195

197
198
199
200
201
202
Tremaine 605, 609.
196
has set forth, Davids learning to accept his own mortality is not a good reason. Elleke Boehmer
has called this a mercy-killing a gift of love,203 but surely this death is merciful only because a
lame dog has little chance of surviving on its own. Driepoot needs a protector as much as Lucy
and David, and Disgrace has made it clear that those who assume they have the advantage can,
in a moment of poor decision-making or by force of history, find themselves in need of
sanctuary. Neither the people nor the animals, Coetzee implies, should have to die because they
are Too many by our standards, not theirs.204 The question of why David doesnt adopt and
protect Driepoot is not answered except by precedent, since he has, of course, failed to protect
those to whom he has been obligated: Melanie, his student, Lucy, his daughter. To the problem
of whether David should then adopt all stray dogs, undoubtedly an impossibility, I would posit
that since this singular dog loves David (and no other dog offers its love to him), David has an
ethical obligation to honor that love even if he does not feel it in return, and especially because
he does.205 Either there are souls of animals, and David has learned to value an animal soul as
much as a human, or there are no souls, neither animal nor human, and the best we can do is care
for each other along the journey of life. If the dog should be seen as for-itself, rather than forhumans, I can only regard the novels conclusion as a sign that, while David has evolved in his
understanding of the other, he has not yet been able to live fully according to his new findings.
His putting Driepoot down can only be one more ethical failure, if mitigated by his suffering as
he does so.
To turn the novels ambiguous and troubled ending into yet another tale of love as a path
to grace206 might seem saccharine and lead to simple dualisms between true and false selves
that Coetzee has apparently eschewed.207 However, if Coetzee has also stated that the failure of
the white masters of South Africa was a failure of love, then surely love, in its many forms, must
play an important role in making restitution. Coetzee has thus repeatedly directed the reader to
matters of Davids heart, the affective sense-image that blends body and mind. The many
theological references interpellated with a post-metaphysical world suggest that God and dog are
one and the same, as they both lead David back to life with immanent, non-discursive signs.
203
Boehmer 343.
205
206
207
See Coetzee on Tolstoy and confession, in Doubling 261.
204
Of Lucifer, and of himself, we may think, David says:

Note that we are not asked to condemn this being with the mad heart, this being
with whom there is something constitutionally wrong. On the contrary, we are
invited to understand and sympathize. But there is a limit to sympathy. For though
he lives among us, he is not one of us. He is exactly what he calls himself: a thing,
that is, a monster. Finally, Byron will suggest, it will not be possible to love him,
not in the deeper, more human sense of the word. He will be condemned to
solitude.208
If to redeem disgrace means to regain our sense of community and ethical responsibility to
others, to pay obeisance, proffer apologies, and defer to others wishes, then David could have
chosen no more productive ways to give himself to the world. Indeed, he has himself been the
recipient of many gifts: numerous women have enriched his life; the university offers him
options to being fired; Lucy gives him refuge; Ettinger assists them after the attack; Mr. and Mrs.
Isaacs give him an audience; Bev offers him a purpose, her care, and her bed; Petrus gives him
the chance to put the past behind him; Driepoot gives him his life. While one may hesitate to
take any of these at face value, an accounting reveals how fortunate David has been at the hands
of others, particularly in contrast to the plight of so many of his fellow South Africans. In other
words if, as Derek Attridge argues, Grace is by definition something given, not something
earned,209 and if charity is the way grace allegorizes itself in the world,210 then David has been
the recipient of much grace and, in his pride and vanity, his disgrace has been to fail to recognize
the signs.
Beginning the novel ambivalent about the power of art, David ends alone in the clinic
compound, playing his African banjo, with art his only solace against the menace of death. As a
Lyotardian work of interrogative art, Disgrace returns him, and the reader, to the agitated zone
between life and death, from the disgrace of the living dead to the grace of the continually
unfolding opportunity to make oneself anew. Art is not the answer, but the question which, by
the act of asking it, becomes the sign of life. Having sought a way for the mind and sense-images
to coexist, David has learned that immanence is all. Doubling his point, Coetzee stages the
208

210
209
confrontation between the subjective experience of the body, the freedom offered by art, and the
depredations of history both in Davids opera and in the novel itself. The postmodern,
postcolonial, posthumanist sublime, is still sublime in the sense that Burke and Kant described
and yet it isnt their sublime anymore. In a 1996 interview, Coetzee stated that in his novels I
do not imagine freedom, freedom an sich. I do not represent it. Freedom is another name for the
unimaginable, says Kant, and he is right.211 David also does not imagine freedom, but only
expresses the longing for it. Evacuated of friends, lovers, animal companions, the familiarity of
good taste, stable meaning, and consoling narratives, the novel demands the reader witness the
creation and reclamation of multiple differends, and to sympathize with a monster as he struggles
to recover his humanity. For not only is David being tested, but we, too, are being examined for
our ability sympathetically to imagine our others. Now that David has lost his power, can we
should we?listen to his voice?
211
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The Postcolonial Sublime in Coetzee's Disgrace, Or, David Lurie's Aesthetic Education

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The Postcolonial Sublime in Coetzee's Disgrace, Or, David Lurie's Aesthetic Education

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Jana M.

Giles Of Gods and Dogs: The Postcolonial Sublime in Coetzees Disgrace 1

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J. M. Coetzees novel Disgrace (1999) deconstructs the Western metaphysical

Coetzees postcolonial postmodernism is not a reification of surface without depth, but a

Burke 103, 130-3.

same: feeling.42 Pure aesthetic feeling is an immediate and unconscious sensation,43

Lyotard, Lessons 11-12.

Lyotard, Lessons 189.

Lyotard, Inhuman 88.

Coetzee, White Writing 37.

Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved

Of awful promise, when the light of sense

Coetzee, Disgrace 22.

Coetzee, Disgrace 16.

Coetzee, Disgrace 142.

Coetzee, Disgrace 192.

Coetzee, Disgrace 158.

Coetzee, Disgrace 205.

Coetzee, Giving Offense 164.

Attridge, Ethics of Reading 8.

Coetzee, Disgrace 218.

Of Lucifer, and of himself, we may think, David says:

Coetzee, Disgrace 33-34.

Coetzee, Doubling 341.

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