Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core.

—J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace

Over a quarter century after its publication, J. M. Coetzee’s 1999 Booker Prize–winning novel Disgrace continues to stir visceral responses from readers. It is Coetzee’s most widely read novel, both at home in his birth country of South Africa and abroad. It is also his most widely translated novel. Disgrace is the book through which Coetzee was worlded, through which his work became known to readers globally, including in translation; arguably, it is the novel that paved the way to his Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. When it appeared, the novel signalled a new ethical accessibility in Coetzee’s writing. Previous works had generated ethical and philosophical debates, primarily among scholars. But Disgrace—published in the wake of South Africa’s widely publicized Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995–96)—posed questions about forgiveness, reconciliation, and a reckoning with a racially divided past that spoke to a much wider national and international readership. The reception of the novel, reinforced by the award to Coetzee of his second Booker Prize (the first novelist so to be accoladed), lifted his work out of the Anglophone literary and academic contexts in which he had largely been read and celebrated in the 1980s and ’90s.

Disgrace is the brutal, lyrical story of David Lurie, a white professor of Romantic literature at a university in Cape Town who resigns from his position following an affair with a female student. He then moves in with his daughter Lucy on her rural farmstead, where three Black men assault him and gang-rape her. The event and its aftermath deform David’s understanding of himself as a South African, a scholar, and a human.

Despite a quarter century of attention and adulation, Coetzee’s style—spare, taut, descended from Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett—continues to stymie agreement over the most basic elements of his story. Questions about conflict (what, precisely, drives the novel’s sequence of events?), or plot (what is the sequence of events?), still provoke irreconcilable, often heated, arguments between seasoned scholars of English literature.

Our roundtable revisits Coetzee’s tale about men, women, and animals in post-apartheid South Africa. Each of us in the past has offered our own interpretations. Arguing against allegorical readings of Coetzee’s novel, Derek Attridge notes that Disgrace “expresses no yearnings for the system of apartheid, but rather that it portrays with immense distaste a new global age of performance indicators and outcomes measurement, of benchmarking and targets.” Elleke Boehmer’s trenchant feminist reading refuses Coetzee’s mythopoesis, however elegantly woven, as an adequate answer to history: “Is reconciliation with a history of violence possible if the woman, the white Lucy, or indeed the black wife of Petrus, is, as ever, barefoot and pregnant, and biting her lip?” Meanwhile, what the novel urges readers to regard as “the worst” is not racial or sexual hatred, or indeed any form of human violence, contends Urmila Seshagiri, but, rather, bodily fragility: “Coetzee sets aside postcolonial literature’s longstanding obsession with history and origins to lay bare the obscene, ineluctable processes of aging and human mortality.” And what Ankhi Mukherjee writes about Coetzee himself is true of the character David Lurie and his aspirations to write an opera: “Coetzee’s fashioning of his literary and cultural genealogy in the classic mold is inseparable from the writerly desire to be recognized and judged favorably by the classic’s exacting standards.”

Below, we frame Disgrace anew, in relation to historical changes since its publication and the shape-shifting ecosystem of world literature. In the global contexts of (and, at best, partial changes wrought by) movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and #RhodesMustFall, the novel’s literary tapestries and cultural minefields are ripe for reconsideration. What freshly nuanced perspectives might we bring to the violent late 20th-century history Coetzee describes? How can we engage the novel’s deeply troubling sexual politics? And what does it mean to teach this novel in the university today?

Urmila Seshagiri

I begin with three stories about reading Disgrace.

2004

A friend flies thousands of miles for a weekend with her partner, who lives in another country. This has been a long-anticipated reunion, and so I worry when my friend calls me, teary and incoherent, from her hotel lobby. I am unprepared for the words that waver through her sobs: “Why? Why did he do it? How could he give up the dog? Why does it end like that?”

My friend, it transpires, has read Disgrace on her flight. And she has been so deeply shaken that she keeps her partner waiting while she calls me to discuss David Lurie’s decision to euthanize a three-legged dog he has come to love. The novel’s conception of a shared existential register between humans and animals had allowed her to hope for a different ending, one that would liberate David from his abjection. My friend is a scholar of Shakespearean tragedy; Coetzee’s writing has shattered her. “I didn’t know I could still be devastated by literature,” she marvels.

2012

A debate over Disgrace erupts between a scholar of modern philosophy and a scholar of modern literature during a weeklong seminar on J. M. Coetzee at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. The literary scholar argues that the novel capitulates to Western colonial master narratives, faulting Coetzee for positioning David Lurie as South African history’s tragic victim. The philosopher dismisses plot altogether and argues that Coetzee’s characters represent ahistorical conceptualizations of the soul. Separated by discipline, age, race, sex, religion, and degrees of institutional stability, the two scholars fail to find a shared language for discussing the novel.

Frustrations grow, as neutral intellectual inquiry turns personal. Civility finally vanishes over the polarizing line, “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core.” Is this sentence an unsupportable distinction, poisonous to the entire novel, or a throwaway thought, an idiosyncrasy of character? Voices raised, fists pounding the tabletop, the philosopher and the literary scholar find themselves at a bitter impasse. The session ends awkwardly, unresolved questions haunting the room.

2023

A professor assigns Disgrace in an undergraduate course on Law and Literature. Reading aloud the scene when David first invites his student Melanie Isaacs to his home, the professor stops abruptly. Suddenly, she hears the words as her students—Melanie’s age—must hear them. Now, the novel feels like a violation; its tensions, galvanized rather than softened by the passage of time, assault the fragile cultural gains of recent years. A new chapter of history speaks across the pages. And the undergraduates—fighting to establish that Black lives matter, that sexual violence is not inevitable—recoil at Coetzee’s vision of human relationships.

The professor is a veteran teacher of difficult, thorny literary masterpieces and an expert manager of classroom dynamics. Nevertheless, she decides, for the first time in her career, to remove a book from her syllabus. “We don’t need Disgrace right now,” she tells her class. The novel’s bleakness overpowers its riches.

Tears. Fury. Avoidance. Each anecdote reveals Disgrace as a work whose signal feat is to destroy critical distance. Whether we attend to distillations of history, ethical abstractions, semantic nuances, or literary genealogies, our reading experiences—public, private, pedagogical—coalesce around (or dead-end into) a sense of disruption, intrusion. The novel’s extraordinary affective power splinters our dialogues. What do we talk about when we talk about Disgrace?

What freshly nuanced perspectives might we bring to the violent late 20th-century history Coetzee describes?

Derek Attridge

The first inkling I received that J. M. Coetzee’s eighth novel would be very different from the previous seven was a comment he made when we met for lunch, between his two “Lives of Animals” lectures at Princeton in October 1997. I was surprised: a campus novel about sex between a professor and a student seemed an unlikely departure for the author of searing explorations of profound ethical and political issues. But when it appeared in 1999, Disgrace turned out to be much more than a campus novel and rapidly became its writer’s best-known and most-discussed work.

Disgrace as it is read in 2024 is, of course, a different novel from that earlier one. Three developments that impact our reading come to mind.

(1) The democratic state of South Africa, five years old when Disgrace was published, has lost its sheen. In 1999, the optimism unleashed by the elections of 1994 was largely undimmed. South Africa’s president, Nelson Mandela, was the toast of the globe; reforms were well underway, guided by the country’s progressive new constitution. Many of those dreams have been shattered: a disastrous policy in response to the HIV-AIDS crisis, the election of an unprincipled president leading to a period of damaging corruption, and the persistence of widespread poverty with a marked racial dimension. All this means that the pessimism about the “new South Africa” that runs through Disgrace no longer seems only a reflection of the negativity of its main character, a white liberal overtaken by the changes around him. Among other disappointments, what David Lurie laments as “the great rationalization”—the global embrace of economism and neoliberalism, an embrace in which the new South Africa was a willing participant—has continued apace since 1999. Indeed, the values implicit in the study of the Romantic poets dear to Lurie’s heart command even less allegiance today than then.

If anything, it’s the novel’s flicker of optimism that now might seem misplaced: the final future-oriented picture of Lurie’s acceptance of his daughter’s decision to go ahead with the birth of a “mixed-race” child, the outcome of her rape by a gang of Black invaders. That acceptance implies a new, serene order of racial unity, one that remains, even today, unrealized.

(2) In 2011, Coetzee deposited 153 boxes and 131 computer disks of archival materials with the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, including manuscripts and notebooks relevant to the writing of Disgrace. Scholars have had the opportunity to explore the creative process leading up to the work’s publication, and, for anyone aware of them, the insights that have emerged inevitably color the reading process. In particular, David Attwell’s discussion in J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing (2016) and David Isaacs’s chapter in J. M. Coetzee and the Archive (2022, edited by Marc Farrant, Kai Easton, and Hermann Wittenberg) have thrown light on the wrestlings and revisions that produced the novel we know.

Coetzee worried that the moral state of South Africa was “anti-intellectual and potentially tyrannous,” according to Attwell’s examination of the writer’s notebooks of the time. Readings of the novel that consider Lurie to be a focus for criticism now, thanks to the notebooks, have to account for how much the character’s views overlap the author’s. Moreover, the work’s “textual impasses . . . record the knots and obstructions, the doubts and anxieties of their composition,” argues Isaacs, who traces the many extensive rewritings of the scenes between Lurie and Melanie Isaacs, some emphasizing the latter’s agency in the sexual encounters, some her passivity. The final text leaves open the interpretation of this crucial question; a knowledge of the manuscripts, therefore, may encourage the reader to withhold too clear-cut a judgment.

(3) In 2024, awareness of the prevalence of racial and sexual violence, and of white male complicity in extenuating and covering up such crimes, is significantly greater than in 1999. The narrative of a middle-aged white male teacher preying on a 20-year-old “Coloured” female, slots in very easily to this disturbing picture. Such predation encourages the kind of outright judgment the manuscripts may be thought to qualify. The degree to which any given reader damns or exculpates Lurie will depend, in the end, on personal history and situation: one reason why the novel has provoked so much discussion and debate.

I write as a (retired) white male university teacher of English born in South Africa in the same year as David Lurie, and someone whose first job was also as a teacher of Romantic poetry. I am aware, therefore, that the remarkable intimacy with which the reader is invited to share Lurie’s thoughts and feelings works with particular effectiveness on me. I empathize with him as he inveighs against the “great rationalization,” or experiences strong distaste at public breast-beating; I understand how a chance meeting with a good-looking student might lead to an unwise proposition; I feel sympathy when his life dwindles to a bare existence and admiration for his devotion to animals and acceptance of Lucy’s choices.

The challenge I face as a reader, therefore—one that movements like BLM and #MeToo have made me more aware of—is to put myself in the place of someone encountering the book from a very different position: say a 20-year-old Black female student. I need to take on board the fact that because of the intense focalization, combined with Lurie’s self-centeredness, we are excluded entirely from Melanie’s feelings; that Lurie’s dedication to music and animals doesn’t compensate for his inadequate treatment of people; that whatever reconciliation is achieved at the end of the novel, Lurie remains a deeply flawed character, unable to accept the power shift produced by the advent of democracy.

I can’t become this other reader. But I can acknowledge as equally valid the different experience the novel offers her. And I can recognize that this openness to varied responses is part of what makes Disgrace both a disturbing and a great novel.

Elleke Boehmer

Returning to Disgrace 25 years on, the still-prevailing context of the 2010s international #MeToo movement draws out starkly the situation of predation of a white male professor on a young, Black or mixed-race student. At the same time, other, more local but equally topical contexts and issues also impinge on our reading. These include the ongoing background of white farm repossession in South Africa (also raised in Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize–winning The Promise [2021], and the discussions around the Land Expropriation Bill currently going through parliament), and the rape crisis, whereby, after high-profile cases of child, baby, and virgin rape, some activist groups in the late 2010s declared the country to be the “rape capital of the world.” The novel still speaks into these conflicted national situations, but in ways that might be less legible within a global arena.

In a South African context, the novel’s contentious themes may also bear a more benign or simplistic aspect than we are faced with today. Melanie is not a child, after all; moreover, Petrus’s repossession of Lucy’s farm is not depicted as systematic, or armed. Under these lights, the novel may appear rather differently worlded or situated, while its significance as a novel of the nation merits further reconsideration.

Might we still consider Disgrace a signature South African novel? Alongside, say, Olive Schreiner’s hyper-representative plaasroman or farm novel The Story of an African Farm, or Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country? On balance, perhaps yes.

For all that the novel is relatively short, it remains remarkably multilayered or multitextured, which allows it to resonate in fresh ways with 2020s readers both at home and abroad. It has acquired a fresh topicality thanks to its other prescient global themes, which have come into greater prominence post-pandemic. These include the questions of aging and bodily fragility that Urmila Seshagiri has already raised; the related theme of care and care-giving, freely bestowed (continued in Slow Man [2005] and the Jesus trilogy [2013–19]); and also of euthanasia and accompanying someone up to/into the moment of death (which returns in various guises in the later work, as late as The Pole, [2023]).

Ankhi Mukherjee

Disgrace is a particularly interesting test case in the “worlding” of Coetzee’s oeuvre, poised as it has always been between, on the one hand, contingent national contexts, and, on the other hand, larger questions of life, death, social death and redemption, and human survival. For example, consider alongside Disgrace another novel of Coetzee’s: his 1994 The Master of Petersburg. Here, the Dostoyevskian themes of Coetzee’s novels attach to the fictionalised figure of the historical Dostoyevsky in Saint Petersburg. But despite their different settings, both novels still speak powerfully to their time and place: whether of Coetzee the professor of literature at the University of Cape Town, or of Coetzee the father mourning the untimely death of his son.

Coetzee’s writings have traveled far and wide, occasionally to unpredictable homes. They have, of course, been canonized in the Anglo-American academic humanities as exemplary instances of postcolonial Anglophone literature. But Coetzee has also been claimed—with varying levels of monomania—by modernist studies, postmodernism, theology, ecocritical and animal studies, vegan theory, intellectual history, poststructuralism in particular (and continental philosophy in general), and psychoanalysis. And when it comes to Coetzee’s geopolitical origins and elective affinities, scholarship enacts greedy land grabs: Is Coetzee Afrikaner, South African, postcolonial, Australian, South Australian, European, American, alien?

Disgrace, however, stops us revelling in the unstable play of the signifier, so we may entertain practical questions and literal readings as well.

Urmila Seshagiri (US): Ankhi, your positioning of Coetzee’s oeuvre takes us into a baffling element of Disgrace: the character of Melanie Isaacs, whose name David Lurie interprets to mean “the dark one” but whose race or religion Coetzee never specifies. In post-apartheid South Africa, where longstanding racial categories have by no means vanished (even if they are less absolutely determining), is Melanie Isaacs—a university student with “almost Chinese cheekbones” who grew up outside of Cape Town, in George—Black, white, Coloured, Asian, mixed-race, Christian, Jewish, Muslim…?

Her race matters tremendously for the plot. But it is a vital aspect of her identity that goes unglossed.

Derek Attridge (DA): That’s certainly a question for the majority of Coetzee’s readers, but not for readers with a South African background. They will be alert to the clues that suggest a Coloured heritage: not just her appearance and name, but also her facility with a “glaringly” Kaaps accent and the references by Dr Rassool to the “overtones” of the case and the “long history of exploitation of which this is part.” (When Lurie visits the Isaacs family home, we learn that they are Christians, unlike “Soraya,” who is a member of the Cape Muslim community.)

The question for South African readers is, rather, why does Melanie’s race not feature in Lurie’s thoughts? Why does Coetzee not provide readers—wherever they are—with clear evidence? (The same question arises in connection with the central character in Life & Times of Michael K [1983].)

US: As it does with Vercueil in Age of Iron (1990), another pivotal and racially enigmatic character in Coetzee’s South African novels.

How can we engage the novel’s deeply troubling sexual politics?

Elleke Boehmer (EB): I agree strongly with Derek’s sense of Melanie’s heritage. How interesting that its “unglossing” calls up at least two sets of readers for the novel: one with some South African background for whom, from the tell-tale signs that Derek enumerates, Melanie is evidently yet also almost invisibly from this group; the other, the far larger set of readers worldwide, who understandably do not clearly see this.

And yet, the fact of Melanie’s race is key to the unravelling of the plot. Moreover, it is key to the novel’s symbolic undertones concerning Indigenous and Black histories, and Lurie’s and Lucy’s (differently) difficult relations to these, as well as to the languages, Afrikaans/Kaaps and Xhosa, in which they are expressed. Here, it’s relevant to add that the Afrikaans language exists across a continuum, whose “glaringness” can be tuned up or down depending on context.

US: A little close reading here, if we can? Here’s the moment when David watches Melanie in rehearsal for the (brilliantly titled) campus performance of Sunset at the Globe Salon, “a comedy of the new South Africa set in a hairdressing salon in Hillbrow, Johannesburg”:

On stage a hairdresser, flamboyantly gay, attends to two clients, one black, one white … A fourth figure comes onstage, a girl in high platform shoes with her hair done in a cascade of ringlets. “Take a seat dearie, I’ll attend to you in a mo,” says the hairdresser. “I’ve come for the job,” she replies—“the one you advertised.” Her accent is glaringly Kaaps; it is Melanie.

To me, the semicolon between the two clauses in that last sentence suggests disjunction, not continuity. I read Melanie’s “glaringly Kaaps” accent as an exaggerated affectation and not her own natural speech pattern. Rather than evidence of her Coloured identity, it’s a performative element to accompany “the wig, the wiggling bottom, the crude talk” that turn her into an “apparition on the stage.” And the “long history of exploitation” that you quote from the hearing, Derek, seems as plausible a reference to sexual harassment in the university as to apartheid’s racial asymmetries.

Maybe Coetzee creates a mystery around Melanie’s identity to foreclose race from being entirely weaponized in the novel? Keeping her race stubbornly opaque stymies the explanatory logic of history. It leaves open the questions that Coetzee—as a “secretary of the invisible” (to crib from Elizabeth Costello [2003], the novel that succeeded Disgrace)—transcribes, conveys through the character.

Ankhi Mukherjee (AM): I am reminded that I was introduced to Coetzee in a graduate course at Rutgers University convened by Professor Derek Attridge, titled “Literature, Ethics, Alterity.” Here, we read Coetzee’s Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg, in a reading list and intellectual milieu populated by Søren Kierkegaard, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and others.

This was 1996, three years before the publication of Disgrace, and the echoes of our exertions and discussions can be found in Attridge’s “The Impossibility of Ethics: On Mount Moriah,” pivoting on Kierkegaard’s and Derrida’s readings of the Abraham and Isaac story (and what Attridge identifies as its “terrifying paradox”) or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe reading Defoe’s Crusoe/Roxana,” about deconstruction “in and on margins.” In particular, Spivak’s maverick reading uncovers (and ushers) a relay of othering: the colonial white Coetzee vis-à-vis the metropolitan classic; the canonical author, interchangeably Defoe/Crusoe, and an erased or fictive figure of self-sponsored authorship, Susan Barton; Susan Barton and Friday, the margin that haunts the text, inhabited by signs without referents, or secrets that “hold no secret at all.”

DA: Another development that has changed our reading of Disgrace is the trajectory of Coetzee’s writing career since 1999. He has published a further seven novels and three fictionalized memoirs, as well as a number of short stories; he also agreed to a monumental biography by J. C. Kannemeyer, as a result of which we have a much fuller portrait of his life, both inner and outer. Now, in fact, Disgrace seems a culmination, rather than part of a continuing artistic development; perhaps it is even a dead end.

Coetzee himself (as David Attwell notes in his discussion of the novel in J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing) has suggested that a life in art has three stages. First, you pose a great question; second, you labor at answering it; and third, the question begins to bore you and you look elsewhere. In this scheme, Disgrace marks the final attempt to answer the question of South Africa’s historical burden and the role within it of the liberal white individual with strong European attachments. Never again did he attempt the kind of realism the novel represents (in a notebook of the period he calls it “dull realism”), and only in the memoirs did he devote any extended attention to the country of his birth. Of a piece with this feeling of the end of a chapter was his decision to move to Australia in 2002.

AM: Very interesting to note the term “dull realism” and Coetzee’s departure from that grim experiment (and the familiar landscape that was its laboratory). The Coetzee of Disgrace is not the Coetzee of Foe: if Spivak had identified in the muted figure of the Black manservant Friday the agential possibilities of a “curious guardian at the margin,” we seek no such unlocked secrets in the prostituted, abused, and raped women in Disgrace.

Writing in the context of the hostile reception of the novel in South Africa, Attridge soberly observes the “complexity of the relation between fiction and history,” which so many of the novels relentlessly explore. An allegorical reading is not possible anymore, not entirely: the theoretical high spirits of philosophical readings of Coetzee give way here to a salvage mode instead, examining the role of animals and art in Lurie’s diminished and chastened existence. “‘Grace’ is not, as it happens, the opposite of ‘disgrace,’” writes Attridge, “The opposite of disgrace is something like ‘honor’; the OED definition of disgrace links it frequently with dishonor.”

The saving grace of this novel—which has so resolutely refused the seductions of public confession and expiation for a public disgrace—is that David Lurie accepts disgrace as his state of being. And he does so without relinquishing the uniquely human talent for dispossessive forms of care, belonging, and self-invention.

what does it mean to teach this novel in the university today?

US: Exactly, Ankhi: Coetzee traps us in a Bermuda triangle where we struggle between the allegorical, the literal, and the historical.

When Lucy refuses to subject her rape to public or legal scrutiny, Coetzee’s phrase for David’s anguish is “Lucy’s secret; his disgrace.” Here is another semicolon that baffles meaning: Do the two halves of the sentence name the same thing? Does David regard the fact of Lucy’s rape disgraceful to himself, or does “secret” refer to the rape, while “his disgrace” names David’s experience of being locked in a bathroom and set on fire? It is one among several interpretive landmines about privately felt emotion and its public, civic, or social expression.

And so we circle back to the question of art (which continues to be Coetzee’s privileged realm for ethical inquiry, as 2023’s The Pole affirms), and to the significance of David’s opera about Teresa Guiccioli, played on a toy banjo in the town dump. The banjo: a small, unsuspected convergence point for an entire body of cultural knowledge that has emerged since Disgrace was published. 21st-century histories of the Black banjo’s rich global evolution have decentered and exposed as incomplete the myth of the white banjo. The instrument, like Coetzee’s oeuvre, has been worlded.

Surrounded by unwanted refuse and unloved dogs, David Lurie performs his opera, playing an instrument indigenous to a continent that he has disparaged, venomously, as “darkest Africa.” Perhaps this spectacle rehearses Orpheus’s doomed descent into an abject underworld. More hopefully, perhaps, it suggests a creative penance: the music of the banjo dissolving David’s voice, as native cultural forms revive themselves.

AM: Lurie’s inability to feel guilt is easily conflated with the novel’s refusal of self-denunciation, and, subsequently, and readers have accused it of hiding behind sophistry and conundrum to excuse sexual violence.

However, to describe morally ambivalent characters—David Lurie acquiesces to being thought of as a “great deceiver and a great self-deceiver”—is not quite the same thing as espousing the same. A sentence such as “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core” is not Lurie trying to sell Lurie’s “rights of desire,” but a mess of self-justification and self-loathing. Perhaps Disgrace is indeed a “poisonous” book, like The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde had spin-doctored the Daily Chronicle’s description to state that his story was poisonous yet perfect). Wilde’s tragic end—and the use of The Picture of Dorian Gray as legal evidence in the cross-examining and the closing arguments in the trial of Oscar Wilde—urge us not to read novels literally, poison though they may be.

EB: Let’s take further the idea of a poisonous text. When we mention the global reputation of the novel, it’s important not to forget that Disgrace became popular, well-known, and worlded by playing on certain stereotypes of South Africa pre- and post-1994 (and the achievement of democracy) that were overfamiliar, irksome, and even offensive to many of his South African readers. To them, its complexities and ethical evasiveness were all too predictable.

Though it was temporally a post-apartheid novel, Disgrace seemed—to readers in South Africa—too much to look back rather than forward, in the manner of those nostalgic for the securities of the apartheid past. It provoked associations with colonial-era Black peril, that often racialized narrative of South Africa as the “rape capital of the world.” Let’s remember Lucy’s words regarding her assailants, “they do rape.” In this light, a hostile if superficial reading might suggest that the events that transpire on the farm negatively critique the loss of white power post-apartheid, and, consequently, the rise of a new lawlessness (of which white farm repossession is one expression).

Relatedly, if racial division in the novel is raw and unreconstructed, so too is masculinity, white or Black. We might think of the several instances that the novel offers of unrepentant male desire. For example, Lucy’s rapists are present at Petrus’s party; or, when Melanie rides pillion on her boyfriend’s motorbike, it stimulates in Lurie driving alongside a surge of raw lust, despite all that has happened up to that point. In this moment, he closely resembles the dog he remembers, who was helpless at the expression of its own sexual nature.

Two further thoughts in closing. One is that Disgrace as a post-apartheid novel may appear as dark as it does in part because it holds out almost no possibility of comedy. There is nothing of the wry bathos and self-deprecation that marks some of the more auto-fictional of Coetzee’s work, despite some of the Lurie-Coetzee links that we have noted.

At the same time, this is my second thought, at points where it might be most serious—when Lucie is processing the consequences of the rape, for example—Lurie’s part in the action descends into a kind of Beckettian minimalism and absurdity. I’m thinking, of course, of those plans to compose an opera about the Romantic poet Byron’s relationship with his lover Teresa. The focus of this project then switches to Teresa herself, portrayed years after Byron’s death, and dwindles eventually into a few twanging, out-of-tune chords played on that same toy banjo that Lurie has discovered.

These inevitably poignant scenes work on our sympathies in perverse ways. They quicken that pity for Lurie we have touched on, despite all that we know he has done, and remains capable of doing. The plink-plonk of the notes that he strums also correlates with those other questions the novel raises, questions that have continued to resonate through our discussion, to its end.