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MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 60, Number 3, Fall 2014, pp.
562-578 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2014.0040

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562

No Higher Life: Bio-aesthetics in Coetzee's Disgrace

no higher life:
bio-aesthetics in
j. m. coetzee's disgrace

Carrie Rohman
Animality and the aesthetic have functioned as two poles around
which a considerable quantity of Coetzee criticism has already circulated, particularly in readings of his challenging 1999 novel, Disgrace.
But that body of criticism has not yet fully articulated what I would
call the animalization of the aesthetic in this contested novel and its
consequences for the interlacing of human and animal being. David
Lurie's devolving chamber opera in Disgrace ultimately suggests that
the artistic as such is not the exclusive or matchless achievement of
human virtuosity. Rather, the aesthetic becomes framed in Coetzee's
text as a tendency of "living in general," to use Derrida's phrase
(12)a bio-impulse toward superfluity, display, and participation in
broad organic and cosmic forces. The aesthetic in this articulation
profoundly exceeds the domain of the human and should be viewed
as a creaturely orientation of life to other life and to the pulsations
to which all life is exposed. In the novel's parlance, the artistic or
aesthetic is undoubtedly part of the Umwelt we share with animals.
A number of critics have developed productive ways of interpreting the novel's treatment of aesthetic questions and its discourse
of species. While acknowledging that "the production of art and the
affirmation of human responsibility to animals" do not constitute a
"way out" of political or cultural impasses in Coetzee's novel, Derek
Attridge suggests that Disgrace conveys the "fundamental value" of
these two strands (177). Attridge claims that both strands "manifest
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 60, number 3, Fall 2014. Copyright for the Purdue Research
Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

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a dedication to a singularity that exceeds systems and computations:

the singularity of every living, and dead, being, the singularity of the
truly inventive work of art" (188). Attridge is interested in why art
matters in the novel. A key reason why it matters is that Coetzee's
narrative reveals the artistic to be deeply nonideal, to be something
that grounds us, reorients us to the most fundamental forces of the
earthly and creaturely, rather than to the self-importance of the human. So the "dedication to singularity" (190) that Attridge identifies
would have to include the singularity of animals' aesthetic engagements as well. That is, the aesthetic and the animal need not be seen
as two parallel but distinct explorations of singularity in Coetzee;
instead Coetzee's work is informed by an emphasis on what can be
termed "bio-aesthetics"a cross-species conception of the aesthetic
that in turn troubles Attridge's association of the "truly inventive art
work" with human singularity in particular.
Readers of the novel will recall that Disgrace presents the experiences of a self-righteous professor, David Lurie, who becomes
sexually involved with one of his much younger students in Cape
Town. Following a significant public humiliation that results from this
relationship, he finds himself cast out from his university and from
almost everything he has come to associate with his academic life.
After he retreats to his daughter's rural homestead in the South African countryside, they endure a violent attack at her property during
which he is assaulted, she is raped, and her dogs are brutally shot. The
novel has created a great deal of discussion and some controversy,
given its contentious postapartheid subject matter. Lurie's intention
to pen a chamber opera as part of his new and increasingly defamiliarized life represents one of the important yet still under-examined
elements of this provocative novel.
Lurie's opera has been addressed specifically by Marianne
DeKoven in her influential essay, "Going to the Dogs in Disgrace."
DeKoven details "an ethical and aesthetic rebirth" (862) for Lurie that
is premised on his renunciation of a predatory, patronizing relationship to women and animals. DeKoven frames the opera as a kind of
alternative to violent male sexuality; yet the opera still allows the
blossoming of the "something generous" that Lurie takes away from
his suspect sexual engagements with his student, Melanie (Coetzee
89). Central to DeKoven's argument is the novel's gradual elevation
of the desexualized, middle-aged woman, embodied in both Bev Shaw
the clinic worker and in the imagined former lover of Byron, Teresa,
who becomes the central figure in Lurie's opera. As DeKoven explains,
Lurie "puts the toy banjo, the means of creating art, into Teresa's
hands: she has become not his muse but the embodiment of his own
creative subjectivity" (869). Moreover, the opera is "gratuitous" in

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No Higher Life: Bio-aesthetics in Coetzee's Disgrace

DeKoven's terms and therefore emphasizes Lurie's renunciation of the
"sexually, politically and culturally potent white male" position (871).
DeKoven's reading provides a useful window onto a specifically
posthumanist evaluation of Lurie's opera, though I will finally emphasize the dog's participation in this putatively degenerating work
of art more than Teresa's. For Lurie's "aesthetic rebirth" in Coetzee's
narrative might also be figured as an aesthetic recalibration in which
the artistic itself is stripped of its humanist trappings and in which the
world of the animal is properly reinstalled at the heart of aesthetic
experience. Such a recalibration lines up with the spirit of DeKoven's
interpretation of the novel as a "salvation" narrative for Lurie, but
it also necessarily expands the ways in which this text challenges
reductionist views of animal subjectivity or experience. In other
words, linking the becoming-animal of the opera to other troublings
of human exceptionalism in the novel presses us to acknowledge
with greater force that the life we share with animals is, as Lucy puts
it, "the only life there is" (Coetzee 74). In the way it unfolds as an
aesthetic performance, the opera challenges understandings of art as
an exclusively human practice, and its development can be correlated
to the novel's own increasing emphasis on transspecies ties on bodily
and affective levels, among others. Moreover, the opera as an artwork
within an artwork highlights Coetzee's self-reflexive project in this
novel: that of examining the origins, nature, and implications of art
for the living in general. There is also a kind of residual sexuality in
the novel's late operatic explorations that requires closer study of
how the novel links the dynamics of mating to the impulses associated with art and the aesthetic.

Art as Creaturely Enhancement

In order to understand how Coetzee's novel dismantles assumptions about art as an exclusively human practice, as well as the
implications of that dismantlement for our world sharing with nonhuman animals, we can turn to a reframing of art as fundamentally
inhuman. In particular, Elizabeth Grosz's work on art and creativity,
which builds on Deleuze and her own deep reading of Darwin, radically
troubles the conventional view that aesthetic experience and production are limited to human actors. Grosz maintains in a 2005 interview
with Julie Copeland that we need to understand art as not only "the
revelry in the excess of nature, but also a revelry in the excess of
the energy in our bodies" (2). Grosz resists the classical coupling of
art with the (exceptional) human species, claiming that "we're not
the first artists and we're perhaps not even the greatest artists, we
humans; we take our cue from the animal world. So what appeals

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565

to us? It's the striking beauty of flowers, it's the amazing colour of
birds, it's the songs of birds" (2). For Grosz, art is not fundamentally
about concepts or representation; rather, art's "fundamental goal is
to produce sensations," and "it's about feeling something intensely
[even if] there may be the by-product of a kind of understanding"
(3). Grosz goes on to emphasize the way that her ideas decenter
traditional notions of art as part of what makes humans exceptional
and superior creatures:
I think what's radical about what I'm saying is that art isn't
primarily or solely conceptual, that what it represents is the
most animal part of us rather than the most human part
of us. Frankly, I find it really refreshing, in a way, that it's
not man's nobility that produces art, it's man's animality
that produces art, and that's what makes it of potential
interest everywhere. (3)
Just as compelling is Grosz's further claim that sexual difference
lies at the heart of aesthetics. This idea could seem counterintuitive
given Grosz's well-known work in the areas of feminist and queer
theory, disciplines which have tended to resist the biological framing
of questions about sexuality and gender.1 Pivotal to her position is
understanding nature as dynamic rather than static, as something
that is always opening toward the new and the future in a process
of becoming. She emphasizes that because animals attract mates
through various "vibratory" forces, through color and through dance,
through song and cadences, the aesthetic is linked to the workings of
sexual difference in evolution: "sexuality itself," she explains, "needs
to function artistically to be adequately sexual, adequately creative,
[and] sexuality . . . needs to harness excessiveness and invention to
function at all" (Chaos 6465). Grosz also privileges pleasure over
reproduction throughout her work on creativity and sexual selection.
Referencing the work of Alphonso Lingis, Grosz discusses the forces
of sexual selection and the bodily manifestations of those forces as
creatures invest in enhancing "the body's sexual appeal" (66): "This
calling to attention, this making of one's own body into a spectacle,
this highly elaborate display of attractors, involves intensification.
Not only are organs on display engorged, intensified, puffed up, but
the organs that perceive themears, eyes, noseare also filled with
intensity, resonating with colors, sounds, smells, shapes, rhythms."
Thus taste, pleasure, performance, and staging all enter into the
aestheticization of the body in sexual selection and evolution: "Art is
of the animal precisely to the degree that sexuality is artistic" (70).
Grosz has refined her understanding of art as having its roots
in animality, and specifically in the workings of sexual selection, in

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No Higher Life: Bio-aesthetics in Coetzee's Disgrace

her most recent book Becoming Undone. There she emphasizes that
animals have the power of discrimination or taste that is central to
aesthetic appeal and choice. "Music, painting, dance, and the other
arts," she explains, "are only possible because the power to appeal
and enhance seems to reside in regular ways in [animals'] use of
colors, sounds, and shapes for the purposes of resonance and intensification. Art is the formal structuring or framing of these intensified
bodily organs and processes which stimulate the receptive organs of
observers and coparticipants" (135). Grosz's discussion of enhancement, bodily intensification, and taste locates aesthetic behaviors
and discernments well outside an exclusively human purview. With
this posthumanist vision of aesthetics in place, I want to suggest that
Coetzee's Disgrace stages a calibration of the animal, the sexual,
and the artistic that challenges our most hallowed notions of human
privilege and agency, and exposesin ways that warrant further investigationthe bio-aesthetic bases of the life we share with animals.

Power, Passion, and the Operatic Project

Coetzee's novel has received widespread critical attention for
its sophisticated engagement with concepts of the boundary between
humans and other species. Some earlier readings seem nervous about
reckoning with the potentially radical nature of Coetzee's posthumanism. Tom Herron, for instance, in a discussion of the novel that pays
some attention to animality, remarks that "Talking about animals,
thinking too much about them, does run the risk of diverting attention away from the novel's depiction of the difficulties encountered
by human beings in dangerous times" (474). Rather than exploring
how the text's pervasive concern with animals might afford insights
into parallel oppressions or ways of being, Herron registers a threat
to human privilege that he fears might issue from paying inordinate
attention to the nonhuman worlds he acknowledges are everywhere
in the novel. Herron goes on to claim that he personally has "no wish
to overturn the [species] hierarchy" (474), revealing a problematic
assumption of his approach: that engaging with the animal question
necessarily translates into a lessened sympathy for human suffering.
In more recent scholarship, the nature of Coetzee's posthumanism
has become the subject of intensive and wide-ranging critical discussion, with less hesitation about the ethical value afforded to nonhuman agents in his oeuvre. For instance, Calina Ciobanu has recently
argued through a Levinasian emphasis on the call of the Other that
the novel produces "an ethics that forces us to imagine the ethical
subject as no longer exclusively human" (670). Still other critics
have advanced arguments that run somewhat counter to Ciabanu's,

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567

suggesting we ought to be suspicious of Lurie's final sacrifice of the

dog at the novel's conclusion.2
Nearly every discussion of the ethical scene in Disgrace links
Lurie's increasing attention to animals with a shifting sense of human
privilege (or the lack thereof) that Lurie experiences on a personal
level. Yet critical discussions of this shift can sometimes reinforce
human preeminence, however subtly, through an emphasis on fundamentally "humane" views of animals. When Adriaan van Heerden
finds in the novel the suggestion that by "learning to treat them [animals] with kindness and respect, we will also rediscover ourselves as
animal and human" (56), the fundamental species hierarchy seems
to be softened, but left mainly in place.3 Instead, I would argue that
Coetzee's works occasion a (re)discovery of the worlds we share
with nonhuman animals and that this discovery gives the lie to our
humanity as it is routinely conceived. As Ciobanu puts it, the novel
makes it "possible to envision not just the animal, but also the human, in different terms" (685). In my reading of the role of art in the
text, Coetzee's work asks us to recognize that aesthetic impulses and
experiences cut across species lines, interconnecting us with other
animals. Such a view makes it difficult to reinstall humanist privilege
within a fundamentally patronizing orientation toward the nonhuman
because it emphasizes how our most hallowed notions of ourselves
and our supposedly higher human worlds are in fact deeply coincident
with the worlds of other species.
This uncoupling of art from the humanan uncoupling that I
explore further in the interpretation of the novel presented below
feeds back into the larger deconstruction of Lurie's initial persona
and worldview. Van Heerden discusses Lurie's "lack of shame" and
"incorrigible lust" at the beginning of the novel in terms of Lurie's basic
values (48). For van Heerden, Lurie's first core value is Romanticism
itself and a concomitant "defense of the rights and inherent value of
the arts and humanities against the seemingly relentless march of
instrumental reason and materialistic values in the new South Africa"
(48). Having been demoted from professor of modern languages to
adjunct professor of communications, Lurie is engaged professionallyat least implicitlyin a struggle to keep the arts afloat in South
Africa's institutions of higher learning. Such values would seem to
set him apart, as van Heerden implies, and echo certain versions of
humanism in which animality, perceived as ignominious, must be
kept strictly separate from humanity or the human.
Van Heerden identifies the "rights of desire" as Lurie's third core
value (51), and while van Heerden connects this value to a masculinist sense of sexual entitlement, it is even more compelling to link
Lurie's belief in the rights of desire with Lurie's sense of Romanti-

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No Higher Life: Bio-aesthetics in Coetzee's Disgrace

cism and the aesthetic. That link is apparent when Lurie brings his
student Melanie to his home for the first time. After a few drinks and
a simple supper, some idle talk of school and future plans, Melanie is
ready to leave. But Lurie detains his student by inviting her to view
a dance video that he has long admired. Coetzee's next line is telling: "He wills the girl to be captivated too. But he senses she is not"
(15; emphasis added). Here, Lurie attempts to set up his seduction
through a power play that involves aesthetic appreciation. He is fascinated by the dance images, which he describes as the "instant of the
present and the past of that instant, evanescent, caught in the same
space" (15). He tries to force the young woman to become captive
to the images, to his elevated appreciation of them, with Melanie
thereby becoming subject to him sexually. When this ploy seems to
fail, he pursues her further by suggesting openly that she spend the
night with him, explaining, poetically, that "a woman's beauty does
not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the
world. She has a duty to share it" (16). When Melanie reveals that
she already "shares it," he remarks, "Then you should share it more
widely" (16). Lurie himself recognizes these entreaties as "smooth
words, as old as seduction itself" (16). But despite that recognition,
he claims that, in the moment, he believes them: "She does not own
herself," he muses, "Beauty does not own itself" (16). Lurie's musings
thus yoke aesthetic appreciation or facility with violation, dominance,
and control. When Lurie pushes his rhetoric too far, this connection
becomes transparent. "From fairest creatures we desire increase
. . . that thereby beauty's rose might never die," he continues, but
this excessive phrase, borrowed from Shakespeare's first sonnet,
plainly fails. Lurie realizes that he "has become a teacher again, man
of the book, guardian of the culture-hoard" and that his effort to use
artistic and literary phrases for purposes of seduction has become
obvious to Melanie (16).
Lurie's initial attempts to use aesthetics as a means of seduction
become even more explicit in the classroom scenes after his affair
with Melanie has begun. In a lesson on Wordsworth, one of Lurie's
self-pronounced "masters" (13), he must ironically dwell on the declension of the word "usurp." Melanie's presence in the classroom
becomes more and more discomfiting as Lurie elaborates the distinction between "pure ideas" on the one hand and "sense-images" on the
other. Here the link that Lurie makes between the realm of aesthetics
and the realm of the sensual becomes painfully clear. After the class
stares back at him with "blank incomprehension," he tries to force
an analogy between Wordsworth's complicated ideas on the limits of
sense-perception with the experience of falling in love. At this point
the lesson has become an intellectual pretense attempting to charm

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569

rather than instruct: "He is sick of the sound of his own voice, and
sorry for her too, having to listen to these covert intimacies" (23).
In the final classroom scene, Lurie must tackle Byron's poem,
"Lara," as Melanie's antagonistic and threatening boyfriend, who has
intruded on the lecture, observes and even participates in the debate.
In an uncomfortable and innuendo-laden analysis of Lucifer's ethical
status and his "mad heart," Lurie thinks to himself, "there is a limit
to sympathy" (33). This telling line not only prefigures Lurie's own
state of disgrace, but also more poignantly raises questions about
where the limits of sympathy can or should be drawnwith Lurie's
own sympathies eventually undergoing an astonishing expansion
beyond the human fraternity. That expansion will be mirrored in the
domain of aesthetics through the Byronic opera that he attempts
to compose throughout the rest of the novel. Moreover, the linking
of sexuality and aesthetics that surfaced in Lurie's interactions with
Melanie won't disappear in the narrative; rather, that interconnection
will take on a new form. As Lurie comes to recognize transspecies
affiliations and affinities, he also manifests a new humility, one that
is more focused on a shared aesthetic "passion" than on self-serving
domination.
Lurie's composing of an opera for the duration of the novel's
action represents a fascinating working through of his own philosophical and ethical transformation from recalcitrant anthropocentrism to
something like its opposite, a cosmic recognition of shared being with
animals that resituates Lurie among the living in general. This working through is in a specifically high-culture aesthetic register: opera.
Coetzee's use of opera to represent Lurie's struggle and transformation interests me for several reasons. On the surface, opera would
seem to be an art form that strains to free itself from nature given
its lavish and highly ornamental texture in terms of sound and even
of visual staging. The operatic voice can be viewed as over-trained,
"tortured" into an unnatural instrumentation that we might compare
to the balletic body: pushed to extremes, the body in ballet sometimes appears shockingly artificial and technical (the symbolic gone
mad). Yet interestingly, the operatic voice can eerily mimic birdsong
especially. We need only think of the famous arias in Mozart's The
Magic Flute to recognize this irony. Thus there is a strange pressure
in which the highly artificial sometimes breaks open onto an aesthetic
mode that resembles nature again. Lurie's opera-in-progress allows
Coetzee to explore this paradox, and thus to pointedly elaborate the
shared performative worlds of human and animal creatures, worlds
that overlap more and more as the opera, and the novel, unfold.
Indeed, Coetzee uses Lurie's approach to his opera as a means
for characterization from the outset. Hence this early passage: "His

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No Higher Life: Bio-aesthetics in Coetzee's Disgrace

own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie
in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the
overlarge and rather empty human soul" (4). This statement may
seem classically anthropocentric in its yoking of the origins of song
to the human spirit. Yet it contains the seeds of a thoroughly posthumanist understanding of human language and music as having
their origins in our animal prehistory, and specifically in the workings of sexual selection. Grosz's extensive discussion of Darwin's
attentions to birdsong provides an explanation for the development
of song and music, and even language, as forms of "sexual allure"
(Becoming 18), and she specifically notes that as "in human song,
in birdsong emotions are elaborated and intensified: something like
'love' or courtship functions as the most common theme, which tends
to confirm its primarily [sic] role in sexual functioning" (Chaos 37).
The centrality of allure to the eruption of the musical in the biotic
scene itself gives us a new purchase on the resonances of "Lurie" as
the protagonist's surname. As Grosz also notes, Darwin, along with
Bergson and Deleuze, sees human language as "only one form of
articulation, one form of language-becoming, and by no means the
only path to language" (Becoming 20):
Language is not the uniquely human accomplishment that
post-Enlightenment thought has assumed, but, for Darwin,
is already a tendency, residing within the voice and in other
organs capable of resonating sound, to articulate, to express, to vibrate, and thus in some way to affect bodies.
. . . Language is not a unique and singular accomplishment,
but, like Darwin's account of convergent development . . .
it relies on the notion that there are tendencies that many
forms of life share. (Becoming 19)

Lurie's notion that the origins of speech lie in song can thus be seen as
a precursor to his shedding of assumptions about human exceptionalism, a divestment staged through the operatic project in the novel.4

Shared Living, Knowing, and Voicing

Early on the narrative reveals that Lurie had been toying with
the idea of a scholarly work on Byron, but weary of "criticism, tired
of prose measured by the yard," he decides that he'd like to write
music instead: "What he wants to write is music: Byron in Italy, a
meditation on love between the sexes in the form of a chamber opera"
(4). That is, Lurie, finding that his recent attempts to write criticism
have been "bogged down in tedium" (4), aspires to write something

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571

that seems more elevatedif one buys into Lurie's assumption that
art stands above criticism, the creative above the critical. Yet Lurie's
theme of "love between the sexes" puts front and center the primal
dance of mating that Grosz locates at the heart of an aesthetics rooted
in animality. There is therefore already a kind of double movement in
the first mention of the opera. It will ostensibly be elevated above the
mundane critical work, it will be "set apart" by its creative impetus
and accomplishment, yet implicitly, the subject hearkens back to the
sexual "lures" of evolution that predate human art by millions of years
and that, in Grosz's terms, constitute the "animal conditions for the
emergence of so-called human qualities" (Becoming 21).
The operaCoetzee's work within the workwill be "dismantled"
or recalibrated just as Lurie's sense of his own and his species' position will be resituated by the end of the novel. Lurie's daughter,
Lucy, signals this pending reevaluation relatively early in the text,
when Lurie dismisses the work of people like Bev Shaw in one of his
more acerbic and ironic comments about animal welfare people who
are, he claims, "a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so
cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and
do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat" (73).5 Lucy's response
is one of the most arresting moments, philosophically, in the entire
novel. She first explains her father's own unspoken thoughts: "'You
think, because I am your daughter, I ought to be doing something
better with my life. . . . You think I ought to be painting still lives or
teaching myself Russian. You don't approve of friends like Bev and
Bill Shaw because they are not going to lead me to a higher life'"
(74). Notice how his daughter's reply pinpoints art and language as
putatively marking a boundary between the elevated and the base,
the human and the animal. But then, Lucy elucidates one of the
novel's own deep insights about this idea of being "set apart," what
DeKoven calls a "central premise" of the novel (855): "'But it is true,'"
she continues, "'They are not going to lead me to a higher life, and
the reason is, there is no higher life. This is the only life there is.
Which we share with animals'" (74; emphasis added). Lucy, Lurie's
journey, and ultimately the opera will insist that humans are not set
apart, despite Lurie's early investment in the aesthetic as a means
of power, distinction, and privilege. Rather, the opera will teach us
that artistic longing comes late with humans, and has its prehistory
in animal capacities.
Lurie's continuing work on the chamber opera stages this shift
toward bio-aesthetics, a shift away from extolling the "higher life"
and toward learning and "performing" the life we share with animals.
Lurie's broader emotional transformation involves his perceptions of
other people, especially women, and his relationship with nonhuman

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No Higher Life: Bio-aesthetics in Coetzee's Disgrace

animals, as already discussed. His initial notion that animals have no
souls and merely require a "humane" nod from afar gives way, first,
to his concern for Petrus's sheep that are marked for slaughter. He
worries over their ability to graze in the days prior to their deaths,
and he eventually balks at eating their cooked flesh on his dinner
plate. And then, further into the narrative, as Lurie begins assisting
Bev Shaw with euthanizing dogs, his widening "sympathies" strike
him in a kind of affective eruption: "He had thought he would get
used to it. But that is not what happens. The more killings he assists in, the more jittery he gets. One Sunday evening, driving home
in Lucy's kombi, he actually has to stop at the roadside to recover
himself. Tears flow down his face that he cannot stop: his hands
shake" (143). A few sentences later, Lurie acknowledges in relation
to the killings that his "whole being is gripped by what happens in
the [operating] theatre. He is convinced the dogs know their time
has come." Lurie's acknowledgment of animal "knowing" is precisely
the key to the text's posthumanism. The less precious and exclusive
Lurie's and humanity's ways of being in the world become, the less
self-assured humans can be of their own distinctiveness. A shared
aesthetic world relieves humanity of its exclusive claim on the artistic
and enriches our understanding of art as a phenomenon of the living
rather than a human singularity.
After learning of Lurie's plans for the opera at the beginning of
the novel, readers witness his struggle with its composition throughout
the middle portions of the text. Following the attack at Lucy's farm,
Lurie returns to his ransacked apartment in Cape Town for a time and
tries to resume his work on the piece. Originally, he thought the work
would focus on Byron and his lover when she is still young, but he
imagines Byron growing doubtful of his continued passion for her: "a
chamber-play about love and death, with a passionate young woman
and a once passionate but now less than passionate older man" (180).
He has found, however, that the frame of the project "failed to engage
the core of him" and that "there is something misconceived about it,
something that does not come from the heart" (181). Changing his
tactics, he tries anew by adopting a different reference point. This
time, Byron is "long dead" and Teresa Guiccioli is in middle age; she
is now "a dumpy little widow installed in the Villa Gamba with her
aged father" (181). Lurie is at pains to emphasize her dumpiness at
this stage: "The passage of time has not treated Teresa kindly. With
her heavy bust, her stocky trunk, her abbreviated legs, she looks
more like a peasant, a contadina, than an aristocrat. The complexion that Byron once so admired has turned hectic; in summer she is
overtaken with attacks of asthma that leave her heaving for breath"
(181). Lurie asks himself, can he "find it in his heart to love this plain,

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573

ordinary woman? Can he love her enough to write a music for her?"
(182). Of course, the answer is ultimately yes, that it is this physically imperfect Teresa who will inspire his sympathies and creative
powers, albeit Lurie is now participating in a form of creativity that
has shifted from his initial sense of "elevated" art.
DeKoven notes how clearly this image of the aging Teresa lines
up with the initially repulsive view Lurie has of Bev Shaw (858). When
Lurie first meets Bev he views her as "a dumpy, bustling little woman
with black freckles, close-cropped, wiry hair, and no neck. He does
not like women who make no effort to be attractive" (Coetzee 72).
As this passage suggests, Lurie likes women who provide clear and
immediate sexual pleasure, even if only through the gaze; and the
text implicitly aligns his initial feelings about women with his early
attitude toward animals. When Bev suggests that he likes animals,
Lurie responds, "Do I like animals? I eat them, so I suppose I must
like them, some parts of them" (81). It's an all too easy move to
change the word "animals" to "women" in this explanation, and the
word "eat" into something perhaps more crude than we'd like to
acknowledge here. Carol Adams's work on the objectification and
dismemberment of women and animals helps us understand the
slippage between gender and species in such comments. Other key
moments throughout the novel raise questions about the overlapping discourses of gender and species within disturbingly sexualized
registers. Most obvious among these is the controversial depiction
of black African men showing Lucy what a woman is "for" when they
rape her.
Yet Lurie comes to recognize those who are made abject by a
masculinist and ultimately anthropocentric world. Ultimately, Lurie
finds his meaningful plot for the opera in an aged, marginalized woman
calling to her dead lover. After Teresa repeatedly cries out for Byron,
Coetzee writes that "from somewhere, from the caverns of the underworld, a voice sings back, wavering and disembodied, the voice of a
ghost" (183). But Byron's ghost's voice is so "faint, so faltering" that
"Teresa has to sing his words back to him, helping him along breath
by breath, drawing him back to life" (183). And Coetzee then goes
on to draw out some explicit connections between Lurie's own story
and the story he is creating through his composition of the opera. He
writes, "That is how it must be from here on: Teresa giving voice to
her lover, and he, the man in the ransacked house, giving voice to
Teresa. The halt helping the lame, for want of better" (183). These
lines use the story-within-the-story to imply that narrative strategies
themselves must be reconsidered, alongside the other practices and
institutions the novel addresses, if the interlocking marginalization of
gender and species is to be challenged. Including the "lament" of the

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animal in the opera (215), as we shall see, confirms this recasting
of what is proper to narrative. These lines about the halt helping the
lame also unfold the ethic of the entire novel, grounding that ethic
in the particulars of Lurie's experience. He, like Teresa, is aged and
marginalized, and he eventually attempts to dignifyto give some
kind of spiritual voice toanimals who are even more outcast than
he. I would argue that Lurie's "giving" voice to animals should not
be viewed as an anthropocentric "bequeathing" or "returning" of the
voice to animals; rather, it is a recognition of the animal's "sensibility, irritability, and auto-motricity, a spontaneity that is capable of
. . . affecting itself, marking, tracing, and affecting itself," in Derrida's
terms (49). This is a shared condition of the living that Lurie increasingly recognizes in the text. Moreover, the "voice" here is not only to
be associated with language or some call for acknowledgment; it can
also be connected with song, with the compositions and choreographies of life itself, as life becomes artistic and calls out, displays and
performs itself. Nor do I wish to countenance the view that Teresa,
Lurie, and the disabled dogs are void of sexuality or passion. Rather,
as I go on to discuss, these deflated figures enact a differently abled
creative becoming that recalibrates the artistic as embodied longing,
with a kind of modesty appropriate to the living in generala modesty
bound up with horizontal affiliation rather than a vertical domination
across, as well as within, species.
Lurie had originally planned to lift melodic ideas and inspiration from "the masters" as he began the actual composition of the
music (184), but he finds that the new setup involving the middleaged Teresa requires its own music. As Lurie attempts to write the
score, the de-elevation of the project continues. He begins at the
piano, but eventually considers that kind of music too "rich." Finding
a child's African banjo in his daughter's attic, he discovers that the
"silly plink-plonk of the toy banjo" seems aesthetically compatible
with Teresa's yearning. As a result, he abandons "the lush arias he
had dreamed of giving her" (184). The taking up of toy banjo music
is aligned with Lurie's retreat from the Romantic vision of an aesthetically endowed human that is set apart from the rest of the living.
Bryon's character reveals these sentiments in Lurie's opera: "Out of
the poets I learned love, chants Byron in his cracked monotone, nine
syllables on C natural; but life, I found (descending chromatically to
F) is another story. Plink-plunk-plonk go the strings of the banjo"
(185). Byron seems clearly to speak Lurie's own recognitions in the
novel, recognitions that ultimately place the biopoetics of life itself
at the aesthetic center of the text, rather than the arrogance and
self-flattering of human artists.

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Humility and Longing

Lurie's attempts to portray the aging Teresa continue to bring
the relevance of Grosz's insights about sexuality, art, and animals
into focus. Lurie, in his own creative reverie, persists in imagining
Teresa's singing role as she tries to summon Byron and his affections.
The toy banjo plunks away, and we are invited to envisage a "woman
in love, wallowing in love; a cat on a roof, howling; complex proteins
swirling in the blood, distending the sexual organs, making the palms
sweat and voice thicken as the soul hurls its longings to the skies"
(185). Grosz's explanation of the evolutionary and bodily origins of art
resonates with this description, as the feline cry of a woman extends
her sexualized desire for a mate into an operatic howl. This moment
allows a modification of DeKoven's claim that Lurie must recognize
the links between himself and a number of human and nonhuman
actors in the narrative, including "de-eroticized middle-aged women"
(863). While these women do not represent the erotic ideal of Lurie's
initial predatory worldview, it is important to articulate the way that
the middle-aged Teresa is indeed still sexual here. She is singing out
like a cat in heat in the midst of Lurie's opera, confirming Grosz's
claim that sexuality needs creativity to be sexuality at all. In this
respect, Lurie's transformation must be said to include the making
catholic of the erotico-aesthetic. In other words, Lurie must come to
recognize that the relation to the eroticwhich he formally framed
in terms of being a predatory "servant of Eros" (89) seeking youth
or beautyis an aesthetically inflected orientation that all creatures
negotiate in their longings and improvisations, in their engagements
with life in the broadest sense.
In the final few pages of the text, what we might call after
Deleuze and Guattari the deterritorializing or becoming-animal of
art comes to the fore. While Lurie is personally consumed with the
project, he also recognizes that its tired, monotonous banjo music
and redundant complaints by Teresa mean that "it is going nowhere"
when it comes to conventional markers of esteem or prestige (214).
"It would have been nice" he muses, "to be returned triumphant to
society as the author of an eccentric little chamber opera. But that
will not be" (214). His former sense of being set apart through a kind
of artistic privilege has crumbled, just as human exceptionalism is
crumbling as the text reaches its conclusion. Importantly, what Lurie
hopes for now is that "somewhere from amidst the welter of sound
there will dart up, like a bird, a single authentic note of immortal
longing" (214; emphasis added). This clever metaphoric complex in
Coetzee's text links Lurie's own longing for aesthetic integrity with
the very primal sexual longing or intensification for the purposes of

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attraction that Darwin identifies with birdsong, an emotive and highly
elaborate musical practice in itself. As Grosz reminds us:
For Darwin, it is perhaps birdsong that most clearly reveals
the sexual nature of song, the productive role of sexual
selection in the elaboration of the arts, and the mutual entwinement of the arts of decoration, performance, staging,
and so on, with each other. Birdsong for him is essentially
music, music at its most representative, and cannot be seen
as a simplified or anticipatory version of human song. It not
only contains tones, pitch, melody, tempo, and rhythm at
least in some forms, it also expressed changes in key and
forms of variations and improvisation. . . . Birdsong, above
all, intensifies emotionsfear, anger, joy, and triumphthat
birds experience or observe in others. (Chaos 3637)
Likewise, Lurie's altered understanding of aesthetics manifests his
burgeoning awareness that the human is not the final arbiter of the
creative.
Lurie's identification with Teresa becomes more and more intense as she strums the mandolin in his imagination and he strums
the banjo outside the animal shelter. At the same time, Coetzee introduces the last dog of Disgrace, the one with the injured left leg that
has, in a telling reversal, implicitly "adopted" Lurie (215). The dog,
we learn, is fascinated by the sound of the banjo. "When he strums
the strings, the dog sits up, cocks its head, listens. When he hums
Teresa's line, and the humming begins to swell with feeling (it is as
though his larynx thickens: he can feel the hammer of blood in his
throat), the dog smacks its lips and seems on the point of singing too,
or howling" (215). The dog's implied ability to respond to the power
of Lurie's song in this moment suggests the dog's aesthetic "taste";
Grosz too emphasizes that "Darwin's assumption is that animals,
even at the most primitive levels, have the power of discernment and
taste, which enables them to appreciate and respond to musical and
artistic enhancements of the body in members of their own species"
(Becoming 135). In this case, the artistic intensification jumps the
species line, and the dog shares Lurie's swelling with feeling. The
bio-aesthetic impulse surfs the human and animal, emphasizing their
shared worlds of becoming.
Lurie's internal response to the dog's behavior brings this discussion full circle: "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 Teresa's? Why not?" (215). In this musing, Lurie imagines
writing in the dog's voice, giving it a rightful place in the "opera"
that he once understood as part of his "higher life." The implications

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577

here include the sense that longing, strife, the excesses of the body
and of sexuality in both humans and nonhumans, are all coded into
aesthetic practices that bind the living in a common network of being and becoming. The species barrier is rendered porous through
a becoming-animal of art that leads Lurie away from a controlling,
entitled, and human-centric aesthetic toward an appreciation of the
erotico-artistic that is more marginal, and more creaturely, yet ultimately more legitimate. The life we share with animals is indeed the
only life, and that life has at its core the artistic, the metamorphic,
the improvisational. These are creaturely modalities of life itself, of
bios itself, not exclusively human prerogatives. The very artistry of art
brings us back to the animal, and humans must humbly acknowledge
the proliferation of the aesthetic across vast manifestations of nonhuman life. This aesthetic co-passion between species amplifies the
ethical compassion that Lurie comes to experience,6 and that ought
to be located at the heart of Lurie's fragile deliverance in Disgrace.

Notes
1. It is useful to note a certain return of the biological in broader critical
trends here. As Catherine Malabou discussed in a seminar at the 2013
Cornell School of Criticism and Theory, life itself cannot be reduced
to a fixed or mechanistic code, but rather should be recognized as
exhibiting suppleness, plasticity, and interpretation at its most basic
levels.
2. While I find the argument unconvincing given the intricacies of Coetzee's novel, Josephine Donovan suggests that its ending is a kind
of aesthetic flourish at the expense of an animal, and that the novel
could have been more "ethically satisfying" if Lurie adopted the dog,
for instance.
3. For a wide-ranging discussion of the problems inherent in "humane"
subject positions, see DeKoven and Lundblad.
4. This foreshadowing becomes all the more clear when we consider
Grosz's claim about song preceding language: "If language begins
as song, as cadence or musical resonance, a force which excites,
intensifies, and marks both the bodies that emit song and those that
hear it, then there are clearly strong affiliations between human
language and the sometimes remarkably complex songs of birds
. . . whales, dolphins, and other song-forming species" (Becoming 19).
5. DeKoven usefully describes Lurie's remarks, which prefigure his
daughter's own rape and the killing of the dogs on her property, as
the "casually arrogant, privileged cruelty" that serves as "a brutal
foreshadow of his and Lucy's fate" (855).

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6. We are reminded here of Derrida's well-known discussion of suffering
in "The Animal That Therefore I Am," where he writes: "Mortality
resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude
that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very
finitude of life, to the experience of compassion, to the possibility
of sharing the possibility of this nonpower, the possibility of this
impossibility, the anguish of this vulnerability, and the vulnerability
of this anguish" (28). In the case of a shared aesthetic "passion"
in Coetzee's text, I would emphasize that while it clearly circulates
around experiences of nonpower in the novel, the becoming-other
of aesthetic emergence also highlights a transspecies agency. There
is a kind of humbly abled, creaturely artist that resides in the Lurie/
Teresa/Dog operatic complex by the novel's conclusion.

Works Cited
Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in
the Event. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.
Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Ciobanu, Calina. "Coetzee's Posthumanist Ethics." MFS 58.4 (2012):
66898.
DeKoven, Marianne. "Going to the Dogs in Disgrace." ELH 76.4 (2009):
84775.
DeKoven, Marianne, and Michael Lundblad, eds. Species Matters: Humane
Advocacy and Cultural Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 2012.
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills.
New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
Donovan, Josephine. "Aestheticizing Animal Cruelty." College Literature
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Grosz, Elizabeth. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham: Duke UP, 2011.
. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New
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Van Heerden, Adriaan. "Disgrace, Desire, and the Dark Side of the New
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