Disgrace J.M. Coetzee My Notable Read of 2005. By David E. Puretz If you have some down time in 2005, check out the book Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee, legendary author and recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, protagonist David Lurie holds a very high regard for poet Lord Byron. An infatuation for him even seeps out of Coetzee’s prose. Lurie, a 52-year-old professor at the Technical University of Cape Town is an expert of the Romantic poets yet is reduced to teaching introductory courses in communications, because the school changed their emphasis of liberal arts to that of technical education—something which he despises. This change makes him lose a certain amount of interest in being a professor; he spends much of his class time trying futilely to teach his students about the Romantic poets. Believing himself to be a sort of specialist of Byron, Lurie is in the process of “working on Byron,”, and on his time in Italy, he says. He tells his daughter later in the book that he is creating a musical, a play of Byron’s life. Many characteristics of Byron’s life, specifically his move to and life in Italy, foreshadow the events that begin to take place in Lurie’s life, his move to and life in Grahamstown, the backcountry of South Africa. Lurie says of Byron, “He went to Italy to escape a scandal, and settled there. Settled down. He had the last big love-affair of his life.” (15) In fact Byron did flee 19th-century England to Italy in 1816 because charges of sodomy were brought up against him, something Coetzee fails to mention in Disgrace, yet highly relevant. The social setting that Byron existed in was one that did not tolerate this sort of sexual activity, yet to Byron, homosexuality, along with his heterosexual promiscuity were his basic human passions, urges, inclinations. Lurie mentions how Italians in the 19th-century were “more in touch with their natures. Less hemmed in by convention, more passionate.” (15) This is the reason Byron flees to Italy. David Lurie’s social setting, two hundred years later, at Cape Town University, highly shuns his sexual activity: intercourse with one of his students, Melanie, someone half his age. And if the university knew about his relations with Soraya, the prostitute, they would have been equally as intolerant. Similar to Byron’s retreat, Lurie flees the urban South Africa for the rural Grahamstown, because of the university’s charges of victimization and harassment—a scandal equally as bad as Byron’s. This is foreshadowed when Lurie discusses Byron’s move to Italy, “a place more in touch with their natures,” with a pun on the word “nature.” David Lurie becomes more in touch with nature and is able to explore his personal natures in rustic Grahamstown. Grahamstown was a place also “less hemmed in by convention,” as was Italy, for it was rural South Africa where Lurie was able to live a freer life without the rules and regulations that went along with being a university professor. Byron’s scandal and Lurie’s scandal have a common glue. There is a sameness to both situations- an equal amount of disapproval from both populaces that surround them. The present day South African university condemns with similar intensity Lurie’s teacher-pupil relationship with thirty-year-younger Melanie as 19th-century England for homosexuals. Instead of facing repercussions, humiliation, and defeat, they both flee to a safer setting, and both think that doing so gives them the upper hand on the objecting higher rule.

Around The Globe, Disgrace Printings Received Numerous Cover Designs

The fact that Lurie is dissatisfied with the university to begin with helps to fuel his persistence for Melanie—if anything, it gives him more of a reason to pursue her. If he cared more for university policy, he wouldn’t have broken it in the first place:

He stretches out on the bed beside her. The last thing in the world he needs is for Melanie Isaacs to take up residence with him. Yet at this moment the thought is intoxicating. Every night she will be here; every night he can slip into her bed like this, slip into her. People will find out, they always do; there will be whispering, there might even be scandal. But what will that matter? A last leap of flame of sense before it goes out. He folds the bedclothes aside, reaches down, strokes her breasts, her buttocks. ‘Of course you can stay,’ he murmurs, ‘of course.’ (27)

Lurie and Byron are both highly sexual for very specific reasons.

“[David Lurie’s] childhood was spent in a family of women. As mother, aunts, sisters fell away, they were replaced in due course by mistresses, wives, a daughter. The company of women made of him a lover of women and, to an extent, a womanizer.” (7) He “existed in an anxious flurry of promiscuity. He had affairs with the wives of colleagues; he picked up tourists in bars on the waterfront or at the Club Italia; he slept with whores.” (7) He had been divorced twice. As for Byron, “it was rumored that his nurse, May Gray, made physical advances to him when he was only nine. This experience and his idealized love for his distant cousins Mary Duff and Margaret Parker shaped his paradoxical attitudes toward women.” Byron also had multiple affairs with a wide array of women and men, and had been married and divorced more than once.

Subtleties of incest between David Lurie and his daughter lye hidden in Coetzee’s text. For example, not only is Melanie his daughter’s age, but Lurie has sex with her in his daughter’s room, on his daughter’s bed, which gives him a “surge of joy and desire.” (29) Also, when trying to comfort her when she’s in a sobbing, miserable mood, he says, “Tell me what is wrong. Almost he says, ‘tell daddy what is wrong.’” (26) And while comforting her, he feels “a tingling of desire.” (26)After exiling himself from the university, he lives at his daughter, Lucy’s house in the countryside. Here, we realize that she calls him by his real name, David, not dad, or daddy, which takes away the sense of their father-daughter relationship and implies more of a casual friendly one. He says that he feels for her “the most spontaneous, most unstinting love”—two words which have sexual suggestion in their meanings. Coetzee asks, “why should they not be open with each other, why should they draw lines, in times when no one else does?” (76) While thinking these thoughts about his daughter, he is caressing her foot and ankle. For, the record, Byron had a clubfoot. Related? Possibly. What is related is the fact that Byron had incestuous relationships himself.

Coetzee knots together the lives of Byron and Lurie, their relationships with women and family. The Byron famous epitaph, that he was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” was said to him in letter form from one of his suitors, possibly his most notorious suitor, Caroline Lamb. In Disgrace, Lurie’s daughter, Lucy, used the exact same phrase to describe Lurie, thus proving Coetzee’s deliberate web between Byron and Lurie, one intermingled with sexual, and possibly-incestuous implications:

Lucy gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. ‘So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change.’ She teases him as her mother used to tease him. Her wit, if anything, sharper. He has always been drawn to women of wit. Wit and beauty. With the best will in the world, he could not find wit in Melanie. But plenty of beauty. (78)

By saying that her mother, David’s wife, teased him with that phrase, shows a parallel between Lurie’s x-wife and Caroline Lamb. More ironic, is the fact that on both of their retreats to their new settings, Lurie and Byron are both accompanied by their daughters, their only daughters. Oddly enough, Lucy is a lesbian, and her location in Grahamstown, an unconventional place when compared to the city setting in South Africa, is an almost-ideal location for this sort of lifestyle. Italy, the location Byron removes himself to, a place Lurie refers to as being less hemmed in by convention and being more passionate, is a location where Byron can express his sexuality more freely as well, a more ideal location.

Byron is always in Lurie’s thoughts as he lives his new life at his daughter’s house. He had volumes of letters and books of Byron, all necessary for further work on his “project,” his musical play of sorts. He would read when he couldn’t sleep and he would use Byron almost as a source of continuity.

For a time Lurie finds a sort of peace on the farm as he helps Lucy. But their fragile peace is shattered, when the farm is invaded by three men who at first pretend to need help and then attack Lurie and his daughter, setting him on fire and locking him in the bathroom while they sexually assault Lucy. They murder Lucy’s dogs and steal David’s car. Ironically, all of his books and letters on Byron are in the car that is stolen. He is only left with two volumes of his letters. Then Coetzee asks a crucial question of Lurie: “But does he need to go on reading? What more does he need to know of how Byron and his acquaintance passed their time in old Ravenna? Can he not by now, invent a Byron who is true to Byron, and Teresa too?” (121)

In order to create a play based on Byron’s time in Italy, it seems as though, Lurie has doused enough information, whereas he won’t need to further his studies. Yet as the book progresses, we begin to see how Lurie’s Byron In Italy mirrors his own life and how character’s in the play, like Byron’s actual suitors, family member’s, and friends, also begin to resemble the people in his own life. Undermining this though is that at the onset, David must branch himself off from Byron, he must disconnect himself, and begin writing the play based on what he knows. “He has, if the truth be told, been putting it off for months: the moment when he must face the blank page, strike the first note, see what he is worth.” (121) This transition in his life shows a lot. It shows a new beginning. One where he must invent himself, take responsibility for self. This whole dramatic rape and burning scene is one which rips him away from Byron. When he is locked in the bathroom, he tries speaking with the thugs. He speaks in Italian, Byron’s language, thinking he’ll be able to communicate with them, yet it doesn’t work, showing how Lurie’s life has been drastically changed from that of his predecessor’s, because of the events that unfolded.

The remainder of the novel concerns Lurie and his daughter's attempts to come to terms with what has happened to them. The three attackers are black, and Lucy comes to see the rape as a sort of justice for historical racial injustice. She is pregnant as a result of the rape and is determined to keep the child. Lurie is horrified by her response, but he too sees the assault in terms of historical inevitability, as the result of a sort of inherited guilt.

Lurie continues his efforts to write his play about Byron, and he continues trying to conform his livelihood around that of Byron’s. The aftermath of the rape scene leaves Lurie in an odd place; he feels empty and misplaced, a reason why the crafting of his play on Byron has started to become frozen.

The project is not moving. All he can grasp of it are fragments. The first words of the first act still resist him; the first notes remain as elusive as wisps of smoke. Sometimes he fears that the characters in the story, who for more than a year have been his ghostly companions, are beginning to fade away. (141)

His life has taken a downward spiral, he doesn’t have anyone in his current life to connect to or resemble those that were a part of Byron’s. He did, he used his passion towards Melanie possibly as an outlet to further the story; whereas she resembled the young Teresa, a suitor of Byron’s, but now, Melanie has become nothing but a distant memory.

Something happens though. Bev Shaw, an older woman who he works with at the dog kennel, throws flirtation in his face, and the next afternoon, they make love. He has reinstated his sexual being, yet this time with a less appealing woman. He compares her to Emma Bovary, “strutting before the mirror after her first big afternoon.” (150)

He returns to the university setting. His old office has been replaced with a new professor. Life had continued on since his absence. Lurie begins to think about how he had conceived his story: “as a chamber-play about love and death, with a passionate young woman and a once passionate older man; as an action with a complex, restless music behind it, sung in an English that tugs continually toward an imagined Italian.” (180) By describing Byron as an “imagined Italian,” one can see how Lurie begins to mold Byron’s life around his own. Previously, before the rape scene, his life was getting patterned around Byron’s; he followed in his footsteps. But since that option was no longer available for him, he decided to create false footsteps, ones that could fit the mold of his own shoes.

Lurie’s exciting prior life, one similar to Byron’s, where as Melanie could resemble Byron’s Teresa, has long since died and caused a long pause in the construction of his story. “First on Lucy’s farm and now again here, the project had failed to engage the core of him. There is something misconceived about it, something that does not come from the heart.” (181)

Bev Shaw had struck an interesting chord with him, though. He begins writing his play again from scratch, yet this time with a new angle. By using Bev to represent an older Teresa, a Teresa in middle age, he begins a new plot. This one involves a dead Byron, a memory of his existence. “Her years with Byron constitute the apex of her life. Byron’s love is all that sets her apart. Without him she is nothing: a woman past her prime, without prospects, living out her days in a dull provincial town.” (182) This could easily be a representation of Bev, taking the form of Teresa. He manages to detail more and more of the play, he creates the lyrics and the music behind it. He begins to interplay other aspects of his life into this new one in which he has created for Byron. In the play, Byron’s daughter, Allegra, begin to represent his own. The play has good movement for a little while, but just as before, he begins to lack motivation and looses faith in it:   There is no action, no development, just a long, halting cantilena hurled by Teresa into the empty air, punctuated now and then with groans and sighs from Byron offstage. The husband and the rival mistress are forgotten, might as well not exist. The lyric impulse in him may not be dead, but after decades of starvation it can crawl forth from its cave only pinched, stunned, deformed. He has not the musical resources, the resources of energy, to raise Byron In Italy off the monotonous track on which it has been running from the start. It has become the kind of work a sleepwalker might write. (214)

Selected Works By J.M. Coetzee Waiting For The Barbarians Foe (King Penguin) Elizabeth Costello Life & Times of Michael K In The Heart of The Country Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life The Master of Petersberg Youth Dusklands Click To Purchase From Amazon.com

David Lurie used Byron as a way of survival. Byron’s mystified life brought David Lurie something to chase after, a road to follow. Unfortunately, the more Byron died out in his soul, the more David Lurie himself died. And in a way, he had already been dead, just as he described Byron as being in his newly scripted play. But after Lurie gave up his last aspirations for the play, all aspirations for himself fleeted.