David Lurie's Learning and the Meaning of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by South East Academic Libraries System (SEALS) David Lurie’s learning and the meaning of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace Laurence Wright One of the teasing characteristics of novels soused in literariness, like J.M. Coetzee‟s, is their tendency to leak, to bleed, into vast inchoate terrains of intertextuality. Trails of significance proliferate seemingly without end. The reader is constantly challenged to measure and assess their implications within or against the frail containing form of the story, much as Russian formalism taught us to keep sujet and fable in perpetual dialogue. However, it has become apparent that in all the dense thickets of commentary occasioned by Coetzee‟s most controversial novel, Disgrace (1999), insufficient attention has been paid to the intertextual implications of David Lurie‟s learning, his scholarly preoccupations. In what follows, the status of the argument presented, which is concerned more with understanding than with evaluation, is debatable, perhaps even undecidable. Part intellectual background, part intertextual commentary, it comes closest to being a discussion of some of the things the character David Lurie might want us to think about, were he in a position to know that we are engaged in reading Disgrace. Unless the reader attempts this kind of exploration, two of the most vexed issues freighting the novel‟s central fabulation: Lucy‟s curiously stoical, impassive response to her rape, together with her decision to stay on in South Africa; and David Lurie‟s sudden, seemingly inexplicable care for the doomed dogs, from their last moments at the animal shelter until he lovingly consigns their corpses to the incinerator, must remain opaque. In particular, the final words of the novel, “Yes, I am giving him up” (220), uttered in relation to the 2 immanent “Lösung” of the little dog Bev Shaw calls Driepoot, will tend to taunt the reader, rather than illuminate. Let us plunge straight into a particular train of enquiry: the matter of the intellectual history or genealogy supplied for the central focalising figure of David Lurie. Evidence comes principally from skimpy but precise gestures towards his various scholarly projects, past and present – a neat way of indicating an intellectual prologue and trajectory, without turning the text into a novel of ideas. We learn that his first book was a study of Arrigo Boito‟s opera Mefistofele (1868, rev. 1875). Two facts about this particular project seem relevant. First, Mefistofele is based on Goethe‟s Faust (both parts of the poem – Boito wrote his own libretto); and second, it is the only opera Boito ever managed to complete. His magnum opus was also his solum opus. Pronounced a failure when it opened, seven years later a revised version enjoyed considerable success. Thereafter Boito laboured unsuccessfully for fifty-four years to complete a second opera. Apparently deserted by his operatic muse, he nevertheless established an enviable reputation as a writer of libretti, Verdi‟s Otello being his masterpiece. It may be no coincidence that David Lurie‟s chamber opera remains immured in words (as far as the reader of Disgrace is concerned) and that much of Coetzee‟s own work comprises metatextual re- fictionalisation of canonical texts. Lurie‟s study is called Boito and the Faust Legend: The Genesis of Mefistofele (4). As a fable the Faust story – the ancient German story-complex in which a magician imperils his soul in his pursuit of knowledge, power and sensual satisfaction – presides over the life and career of David Lurie, as perhaps it does over scholarly and scientific pursuits in general. 3 The question to which we must return is Why opera? Why music? Wouldn‟t Goethe‟s poem have sufficed? His next venture is entitled The Vision of Richard of St Victor, in which David Lurie becomes preoccupied with one of the most important scholastic discussions of mystical transcendence. One passage from Richard (d. 1173) might still today be regarded as public property, as sufficiently well known to be recognized by non-specialist readers, and it comes from his work called The Twelve Patriarchs (also known as the Benjamin Minor): The full knowledge of a rational spirit is a mountain great and high. This mountain transcends the highest point of all mundane knowledges; from the height it looks down upon all philosophy, all knowledge of the world. What so excellent did Aristotle or Plato discover; what so excellent was a crowd of philosophers able to discover? - - - He who arrives at perfect knowledge of himself takes possession of the summit of the mountain. (trans. Zinn, 133) The visionary project of summiting the mountain of self-knowledge marks the first phase of Lurie‟s scholarly odyssey in the footsteps of Faust/Mefistofeles. Richard of St. Victor‟s major work is The Mystical Ark or Benjamin Major, known to literary scholars mainly as the basis of the mystical psychology of Dante‟s Paradiso. In it Richard depicts the soul ascending through various stages of contemplation; through reason, imagination, and understanding, gradually relinquishing all sensible objects of thought, until finally it contemplates that which surpasses reason, and may even be beside or contrary to reason. This is the condition of mentis alienato, or ecstasy, in which all memory of the present leaves the mind and simple, direct contemplation of truth is attained. In Richard of St Victor‟s version, this is the high mountain of 4 ecstatic contemplation upon which Christ is transfigured, and one of the key moments in which the philosophy of Plato becomes assimilated to the teaching of the Gospels. Lurie studies it under the rubric of “eros as vision” (4). Lurie‟s subsequent book, we are told, was a study called Wordsworth and the Burden of the Past. The title gestures to a famous short work by Walter Jackson Bate, entitled The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1970). In post- apartheid South Africa, and in Disgrace, the past is an ethical and political burden in a particular sense, one deeply felt by David Lurie and his daughter. But it is also, and in a correlated way, a burden felt directly in the defining problem of the romantic poet (and, perhaps, the post-apartheid white writer) as expressed by Bate, “What is there left to do?” (3). Bate‟s book was very influential, not least in the reading – or strong mis- reading – to which it gave rise in the work of Harold Bloom, who has spent much of his scholarly life exploring the condition of romantic belatedness, the feeling of having arrived after all the big statements have been made, yet needing desperately to be original in order to neutralize the „anxiety of influence‟ (see The Anxiety of Influence, 1973). To escape this condition, the romantics resort to complex archaeologies of the self, and a deep preoccupation with responding adequately to the present moment, sporting an overt fictive reliance on fidelity to actual, present experience. We see something like the kernel of this project and its problems in the vignette presented of David Lurie‟s university class on Book 6 of The Prelude, where we encounter another mountain: „From a bare ridge,‟ he reads aloud, we also first beheld Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved 5 To have a soulless image on the eye That had usurped upon a living thought That never more could be. (21) He trails his uncomprehending students through the distinction between „usurp‟ and „usurp upon‟: “Usurp, to take over entirely, is the perfective of usurp upon; usurping completes the act of usurping upon” (21). This apparently inconsequential poetic moment presents a fleeting feeling of grief and estrangement accompanying the realization that human perception is absolutely limited by the perceptual apparatus of the physical body. Such a moment marks a distinct step towards that philosophical egoism which later metamorphosed into the massive egotism seen in romantic individualism – notably exemplified in the figure of Byron. In philosophical terms, this Mont Blanc episode gestures towards the Kantian revolution which prepared the way for romanticism, in a sense underwriting its entire discourse. Kant had proposed and defended radically new limits for what can and cannot be known by human beings. He confined knowledge to the sphere of actual or possible experience, to the empirical and conceptual deliverances of human sensibility and its mental and technological extensions. Whatever we know, we can know only according to our physiological and mental make-up as human beings. That there are other forms of sensibility (as in other life forms, dogs, for example) we cannot doubt. Similarly, that there is a reality beyond the reach of our own perceptual and conceptual apparatus we cannot doubt. But whatever its nature, this reality must remain permanently inaccessible. Dismayed, though hardly surprised, by his class‟s failure to experience any “flash of revelation” concerning the Mont Blanc passage (21), David Lurie 6 spells out some of its implications. (I interpolate comments to flesh out the bare bones of this sketch.): „ - - - Wordsworth seems to be feeling his way towards a balance: not the pure idea, wreathed in clouds [in other words, not the immediate mystical self-apprehension seen in Richard of St. Victor, the beatific vision], nor the visual image burned upon the retina, overwhelming and disappointing us with its matter-of-fact clarity [i.e. not the „reality‟ delivered by empiricism, and exemplified in the realist novel], but the sense-image, kept as fleeting as possible, as a means towards stirring or activating the idea that lies buried more deeply in the soil of memory.‟ (22) The passage posits the coming together, the interaction and fleeting integration, of subject and object, noumenon and phenomena, in the act of perception – an act completed by the stimulation or re-awakening of aboriginal memories of a Platonic reality through the process called anamnesis.

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