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1 Trials and Errors As Points of Departure in Disgrace and the Human Stain “Desire Is Rupture, Not Exchange.” —J.M. Coetze

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1 Trials and Errors As Points of Departure in Disgrace and the Human Stain “Desire Is Rupture, Not Exchange.” —J.M. Coetze 1 Trials and Errors as Points of Departure in Disgrace and The Human Stain “Desire is rupture, not exchange.” —J.M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country 1. J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace was published in late 1999 to immediate acclaim in England, the United States and much of the English-speaking world. Shortly after its release it was awarded the Booker Prize, making Coetzee the first writer to win it twice and redirecting the American hardcover into multiple printing runs, reading groups, and college classrooms all over the country. Philip Roth’s The Human Stain appeared in the spring of 2000 to an equally eager audience. Roth, unlike Coetzee – or any other contemporary author I can think of, for that matter – had already been producing literary bestsellers for over four decades, many of which have since entered the canon of American classics. (Portnoy’s Complaint made the Random House top 100 English novels of the twentieth century around the same time as The Human Stain’s appearance.) “Our feet,” laments John Leonard of Roth’s tenacious staying power in the consciousnesses of his fellow readers and writers, “are stained with the gripes of Roth” (6). The concluding novel of his recent trilogy of American life was wholly contemporary in 2000, its title alluding of course to the recent trial of a President then completing his final year of office. The Human Stain, like Disgrace, is an ambitious, telling, and provocative commentary on the state of the nation at the turn of the millennium. Both novels begin with the accusation of a professor charged with racism or sexual harassment; enraged and bewildered, the character refuses to bow to the demands of his inquisitors (whose outrage is a stand-in for the general public) and is subsequently hounded out of his position. Most reviews acknowledged correctly that 2 the charges of harassment levied against the protagonists were not in themselves central to the novels, but rather a point of departure, an “overture” (Banville 23) for demonstrating how “the public zeitgeist can shape” or “even destroy an individual’s life” (Kakutani). Disgrace is Coetzee’s first fictional depiction of post-Apartheid South Africa. John Banville registers “mild shock” in response to the book’s uncharacteristic topicality; it is, for a Coetzee novel, particularly “crowded with the burning, or at least smoldering, and in some cases barely sputtering, issues of the day” (23). The Human Stain, like American Pastoral and I Married a Communist before it, turns narrator Nathan Zuckerman’s analytic acuity outward in a close examination of postwar American life. This is accomplished with the assistance of three characters whose tales he researches, imagines, and recounts. In this manner Roth provides his narrator the distance needed to capture the historical currents of an era and, more importantly, its profound determination over the lives of its individual participants. If The Human Stain, then, is about the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union and Disgrace aims to depict South Africa after the ANC’s rise to power, why do both novels share so many uncanny parallels? What is the significance of originating their plots in a provincial college crucible? How can the Aschenbachian transformation of a respected professor in the Humanities help us recognize the new realities of a post-Apartheid, post-Cold War world? This paper will attempt to answer such questions by examining four points of their shared resemblance: first, the interwoven fates of individuals and their countries; second, an authorial contempt for the general stupidity of the age, most clearly expressed in their condemnation of what transpires in the universities; third, a moral concern for the shame, disgrace, and 3 humility of the individual in the face of society’s unjust censure; and finally, a pessimistic evaluation of human nature and its humanist aspirations. Coetzee and Roth are by no means alone in their suggestion that travesties of political correctness are representative of that historical moment. As literary work set in the latest fin-de-siècle continues to appear (especially those begun before the events of late 2001 inexorably altered one’s perspective) it is evident that this subject was not the exclusive terrain of septuagenarian giants.1 Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections, for instance, which also aims to portray the United States at the end of the century, opens with the shameful episode of the youngest Lambert son, who is for similar reasons disgraced and expelled from his position at a small liberal arts college in New England. With the passage of time, the final years of the twentieth century begin to crystallize, gradually improvising a coherent singularity of their own from the (albeit low-lying) perspective of our twenty-first century perch; the music, fashions, and idiomatic expressions of the nineties, like all decades before them, cluster together and acquire their perceptibly time-encoded pattern. “It wasn’t going to be 1953 forever,” says Ernestine, Coleman Silk’s estranged sister in The Human Stain: “People age. Nations age. Problems age” (326). When we consider today’s problems and contrast them against those confronting us only five years ago, we are confronted by how both nations – and the challenges of an earlier time – have aged. It is therefore from the vantage point of the present that I will try to understand why the trials and errors of both protagonists resemble one another so closely. 2. 1 Roth has been especially fixated with it, incorporating it into all three of his most recent novels. I would be more likely to consider Roth’s complaints idiosyncratically disproportionate – I cannot recall a cause célèbre of the time resembling that of his characters’ since the Clarence Thomas hearings (not that the motives charted by Roth might be implausible) – were it not for the topic’s appearance in other books as well. 4 “… [T]he fate of millions is often most apparent in those who by profession note changes in themselves, i.e., the writers.” —Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind The symbolic linkage of the fate of an individual to that of his country is nothing new for either writer. It may well be that J.M. Coetzee is, as Banville asserts, “conscious that it is precisely by virtue of its timelessness that art contributes to its time, and to times to come” (23), but even the most generally ambiguous setting in his novels – say, the mythical landscape of Waiting for the Barbarians – is clearly representative of the South Africa whose historical, recurrent outbreaks of cruelty infiltrate even the smallest village, penetrating its inhabitants completely.2 Philip Roth’s counterpart of old, Nathan Zuckerman, first breaks out of his egoistic shell after traveling to Prague and becoming extensively engaged with Eastern European fiction; his discovery of the paradox under which its writers live, the oppressive climate of occupied Czechoslovakia where “nothing goes and everything matters” – the very reverse of what had precipitated his writer’s block and consequential breakdown in The Anatomy Lesson – opens his fiction to the outside world beginning with The Prague Orgy, an “epilogue” to Roth’s Zuckerman Bound trilogy. This fictional universe expands to encompass Israel and England in The Counterlife before taking aim at the hopes of postwar America in his most recent trilogy. “A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE”: these are the words draped from one end of the White House to the other in a dream Zuckerman relates at the beginning of The Human Stain. In a magnificent opening recapitulating the events of that “summer when a president’s penis was on everyone’s mind, and life, in all its shameless 2 Cf. critic Michael Gorra’s claim that Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer stand in opposition to one another regarding their approach to writing; the former is allegoric, mythic, and unspecific, while the latter names names in her realistic depiction of current historical events. Coetzee’s strategy is visible, of course, in all of Kafka’s work. 5 impurity, once again confounded America” (3), Roth draws the curtain on the United States in 1998, a time when the arguably most powerful man in the world was publicly reduced to his phallus, and nothing but. Clinton’s impeachment trial is mentioned alongside Zuckerman’s introduction of the novel’s protagonist. The narrator asserts that the “persecuting spirit,” a spirit “no less exacting” and “in behalf of no less exalted ideals” than those of an Ayatollah Khomeini (2-3), is ubiquitous, a mania to which Coleman Silk, former Dean and Professor of Classics at a small college in rural New England, has fallen victim. The first ten pages of Disgrace are a miniature prelude to the longer one that follows, the brief affair with a student that exiles Professor David Lurie onto his daughter’s small farm in the Eastern Cape province. When Lurie accidentally confronts his weekly escort in the street with her two sons, it alters the business relationship that till then had “to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well” (1). After a brief attempt to track her down (despite her having already terminated all contact with him quite adamantly), Lurie yearns to fill the void left in her absence. The reckless insistence of his desire, a compulsion without which Lurie can conceive of no other alternative than to prepare for death, leads to a number of failed encounters, one of them with his department’s new secretary. Their conversation over lunch is eerily prescient in its description of the problems many South Africans now confront: … she complains about her sons’ school. Drug-pedlars hang around the playing-fields, she says, and the police do nothing.
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