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Wordsworth, Lucy, and Post-Apartheid Silence in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace Author[S]: Michael Sayeau Source: Moveabletype, Vol

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Wordsworth, Lucy, and Post-Apartheid Silence in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace Author[S]: Michael Sayeau Source: Moveabletype, Vol Article: ‘Oh, the difference to me!’: Wordsworth, Lucy, and Post-Apartheid Silence in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace Author[s]: Michael Sayeau Source: MoveableType, Vol. 7, ‘Intersections’ (2014) DOI: 10.14324/111.1755-4527.061 MoveableType is a Graduate, Peer-Reviewed Journal based in the Department of English at UCL. © 2014 Michael Sayeau. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. “Oh, the diference to me!”: Wordsworth, Lucy, and Post-Apartheid Silence in !"! Coet$ee%s Disgrace !"! Coet$ee%s work o)er the past decade has been structured by an am*ivalence bordering on hostility to the forms in which he writes or speaks! His books arrive in the shops mar(ed as “fction,” but readers are more likely to fnd a set o+ essays (as in Diary of a Bad Year/ or academic talks (as in Elizabeth Costello/ than narrative prose! On the other hand, when as(ed to deliver a talk o+ his own – such as the Tanner Lectures at Princeton that formed the basis o+ Lives of the Animals or his No*el Prize acceptance speech in 2003 – Coet$ee has recourse to fctions! In a promotional blur* for Da)id Shields%s 2010 anti-no)elistic polemic Reality Hunger, Coet$ee%s dissatis+action with the con)entional underpinnings o+ the no)el as a form comes in an e)en more caustic form! I, too, am sick o+ the well-made no)el with its plot and its characters and its settings! I, too, am drawn to literature as (as Shields puts it/ ‘a form o+ thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seekin'%! I, too, like no)els that don9t look like no)els!7 But what was it that made this highly respected no)elist, who has won the Boo(er Prize twice and is a No*el laureate, turn so starkly against his own form; 1 Cited in, Zadie Smith, “An essay is an act of imagination. It still takes quite as much art as fiction.” The Guardian, 21 November 2009, Features and Reviews p.2. 39 1he closest we can come to an answer is to be found not in Coet$ee%s late, generically +ractured works but rather in the last generically con)entional no)el that he wrote! Disgrace most certainly is “well-made” and possesses a plot, characters, and a settin'! Despite the fact that it maintains self-consistency, it also stages the collapse o+ the basic aesthetic attri*utes and stances that underwrite the no)el as a form! What falls from grace in Coet$ee%s no)el is not just its protagonist but the comple= o+ lyricism and desire that has long formed the kernel at the heart o+ Western literature o+ whate)er genre! Both Lurie and the literary collapse into lingering o*solescence under the pressures o+ a new South A+rica, itself mar(ed by violence and irrational “rationalization” like the apartheid-era nation that it superseded. Disgrace is a no)el that traces the uneasy lingering on o+ the aesthetic and those who live in accordance with its ideologies in a situation – that o+ the contemporary world in general and o+ post-apartheid South A+rica in particular – in which it seems doomed to e=tinction! In particular, it is the fgure o+ the poet William Wordsworth, and the role that he plays in Lurie%s life and desires, that pro)ides the key to understanding the relationship between the aesthetic and the changin' world in Coet$ee%s wor(. 40 Sunset at the Glo*e Salon As &erek Attridge .amon' others/ has argued, #oet$ee%s works ha)e always *een preoccupied with the ?uestion o+ alterity, o+ the self%s relation to the other! 3 Disgrace is no e=ception, *ut what is )ital to note +rom the start is that the matter o+ alterity is entangled in this no)el +rom the start with ?uestions a*out the aesthetic! At one point early in the no)el, the protagonist, &a)id Lurie, adjunct pro+essor o+ communications at #ape 1echnical @niversity, ea)esdrops upon a rehearsal o+ a play in which his student and lo)er, Melanie Issacs, has a part: unset at the !lobe alon is the name o+ the play they are rehearsing: a comedy o+ the new South A+rica set in a hairdressin' salon in Hill*row, Johannes*er'! On sta'e a hairdresser, fam*oyantly gay, attends to two clients, one black, one white! Patter passes amon' the three o+ them: jo(es, insults! #atharsis seems to *e the presidin' principle: all the coarse old prejudices *rought into the light o+ day and washed away in gales o+ laughter!5 #oet$ee%s snapshot description o+ the players on the stage presents a photographic negative o+ the strai'ht white male pro+essor in the audience: multicultural, *i-gendered, and “Aam*oyantly gay!” But this in)ersion only mirrors a deeper distinction *etween the ethico- 2 As Derek Attridge writes in J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p.12, Coetzee’s works can be read as a continued, strenuous enterprise in acknowledging alternity, a project which is at once highly local in its engagement with the urgent political and social problems of South Africa – no less urgent since the end of apartheid in 1994 – and widely pertinent in its confrontation of the ethical demands of otherness, and its investigation of the relation of otherness to language, culture, and knowledge. 3 J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace, (New York: Viking), 1999. p.23. All further references are to this edition, with page references following quotations in parentheses. 41 aesthetic approaches o+ the play on the stage and the no)el in which it is represented. In unset at the !lobe alon, catharsis and amnesty are purchased with truth and narration 0 it is a +orm o+ pu*lic psychotherapy +or the *attered communal unconscious o+ South A+rica%s post- apartheid citi$enry! "oreo)er, the play stands as a strange echo o+ the 1hird Way political ethics that in+ormed the 1ruth and Beconciliation #ommission o+ the 7CC4s! Dor the (ey words are 1ruth and Reconciliation, not 1ruth and Retri*ution: “all the coarse old prejudices EareF brought into the light o+ day and washed away in gales o+ laughter!” #learly, unset at the !lobe alon and Disgrace approach the situation o+ post- Apartheid South A+rica +rom directions that seem to *e in star( opposition! #omedy in the one case is met *y tragedy .or somethin' beyond tragedy/ in the other, catharsis *y de)astation, and an end-point in “'ales o+ laughter” *y the de)astated wretchedness o+ Lurie%s -nal situation! Still, howe)er diferently inAected are the aesthetic and ethical tactics o+ the two works, *oth stand as an attempt to answer the same ?uestion: the ?uestion o+ compromise, o+ stayin' on, makin' do, a+ter the crisis 0 the ?uestion o+ how, in Lurie%s phrase, “to cleanse the city without divine help”; (C7/! 42 In a re)iew o+ Walter Benjamin%s Arcades Pro#ect for the $e% York Revie% of Books, #oet$ee ma(es a parenthetical reference to William Wordsworth that seems very rele)ant to one o+ the central preoccupations o+ Disgrace: Baudelaire was central to the Arcades plan because, in Benjamin9s eyes, Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du mal frst re)ealed the modern city as a su*ject for poetry! (Benjamin seems not to ha)e read Wordsworth, who, ffty years before Baudelaire, wrote o+ what it was like to be part o+ a street crowd, bom*arded on all sides with glances, da$$led with advertisements/!G #oet$ee has o+ten constructed his no)els in direct con)ersation with some past masterH for instance, with Doestoe)sky in (he Master of Petersburg, KaJa in (he Life and Times of Michael K., and o+ course with Defoe in 'oe! Our attention is therefore captured when, in a re)iew appearing so soon a+ter Disgrace, the central literary fgure behind and within the no)el is compared by the author to Baudelaire, especially Benjamin%s Baudelaire! Lurie as an a)atar o+ Wordworthianism demonstrates the same condition o+ “petrifed unrest” that drew Benjamin so strongly in the direction o+ Baudelaire! And the frst third o+ the no)el, set in Cape Town and centered upon Lurie%s afair with his student Melanie Issacs, is principally preoccupied with laying down the groundwork o+ the tragicomedy o+ this lefto)er 4 J. M. Coetzee, “The Marvels of Walter Benjamin.” The New York Review of Books, January 11, 2001, p.29. 43 Wordsworthian in lo)e! In a certain sense, the episode plays out e=actly as we might e=pect! Lurie slides through Cape Town on a slick sheet o+ romantic rhetoric, persistently translatin' the materiality and the e)erydayness o+ the city into poetic discourse and auto-narrated e)ents! He borrows sensual language from Baudelaire for his encounters with Soraya, an “e=otic” prostitute with whom he has a weekly meetin'! A walk down the street prompts o)erheated rhetoric: “He has always been a man o+ the city, at home amid a fu= o+ bodies where eros stalks and glances fash like arrows” (K/! And then there is the language that accompanies his frst attempts to seduce Melanie! E=plaining his passion for Wordsworth to her, he states that in his e=perience, “poetry speaks to you either at frst sight or not at all.
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