English Writing

Pretending you are an archeologist, examine Reinhart’s and McDonald’s essays. What would you say are the primary values of those who write such essays and how are these values reflected in the conventions, language, and features of the two essays?

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4: Disgrace and the Neighbor:
An Interchange with Bill McDonald

Kenneth Reinhard

IN HIS ESSAY, “‘IS IT TO LATE TO EDUCATE THE EYE?’: David Lurie, Richard of St. Victor, and ‘vision as eros’ in Disgrace,” Bill McDonald is primarily
concerned with the nature of erotic vision in Coetzee’s novel, and the pos-
sibilities — and limitations — of the redemption that vision represents. The
central character in Disgrace, David Lurie, is a literary critic, and McDonald
has taken seriously the account we are given of Lurie’s main scholarly
works, in particular, his monograph on the twelfth-century Christian mys-
tic, Richard of St. Victor. McDonald shows how this work, as well as Lurie’s
books on Boito’s opera Mefistofele and Wordsworth’s sense of history,
informs the development of Lurie’s character, as well as Coetzee’s novel on
a more structural level. McDonald describes the transformation of Lurie’s
“disgrace” into a kind of “grace,” parallel with, as McDonald writes, “the
contemplative, ascetic spirit” if not the precise stages of the soul’s journey
to redemption described in Richard’s writings. Coetzee’s novel, however,
works in a modernist or perhaps postmodernist mode, with an ambiguous
conclusion — ironic, ambivalent, indeed, according to McDonald, incon-
clusive. Although he does not discuss in detail the surprisingly harsh criti-
cism Disgrace has received for the various perspectives on post-apartheid
South Africa that some readers have attributed to it, McDonald makes it
clear that the novel’s politics must not be understood as either an independ-
ent issue or as an allegorical counterpart to the various sexual relationships
presented in it. Rather, the politics of Coetzee’s novel are intrinsically
erotic. No “vision” that the novel may present for the future of South Africa
can be separated from the varieties of violent sexual experience it represents
or imagines, from seduction and rape to prostitution and adultery.
Moreover, McDonald shows how this violence is not merely understood as
associated with sexuality, as we might expect, but with love; such “violent
love” may not only be inevitable in the traumatized landscape of South
Africa, it may be the very condition of salvation. As McDonald indicates,
such an account of love’s salutary violence is central to Richard of St.
Victor’s thinking, especially in his Four Degrees of Violent Charity, as is evi-
dent from its title (“charity” of course is the translation of caritas, the Latin
version of agape, used by early Christianity to signify non-erotic modes of

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700.
Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:16:47.

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love). McDonald’s reading does not condemn Coetzee for the violence of
his representations of eros, but sees that whatever political vision the novel
may have must be understood as not incidentally but necessarily, and even
redemptively, bound up with that violence.

I have two sets of related questions and comments about Bill
McDonald’s reading of Disgrace, both of which ultimately involve the role
of Richard of St. Victor’s writings in the novel. The first has to do with the
nature of vision in the novel, and the possibilities of redemption that may
or may not be available through it; the second has to do with the nature
of social relations between people who are neither friends nor enemies, the
question of the neighbor in the novel. Both vision and the neighbor are,
finally, bound up with love in Richard of St. Victor’s writings and Coetzee’s
novel. And for both Richard and Coetzee, love implies a certain violence
that cannot remain merely contemplative.

First, what are the redemptive possibilities and limitations of vision?
For Richard of St. Victor, in the tradition of the Pseudo-Dionysius and
earlier Neoplatonism, contemplative “vision” is a spiritual tool that har-
nesses erotic drives for the purpose of mystical union with God. In St.
Augustine’s distinction, it is for the goal of the enjoyment (frui) of its
object rather than instrumental “use” (uti) — an enjoyment that is for its
own sake and, finally, only completely realized in the form of enjoyment of
God.1 For David Lurie in Disgrace, vision is not only the primary conduit
for his sexual attractions but, as McDonald points out, the rhetorical lure
that he uses to seduce Melanie Isaacs in (and out of) his literature class, in
tendentious figures such as his description of poetry as a “flash of revela-
tion and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love” (13).
Lurie’s question, which is taken up by McDonald, “is it too late to educate
the eye?” could be reformulated as the question of whether Lurie can find
in his own personal and intellectual history the resources to transform his
erotic “use” of the object of vision into something closer to Augustine’s
notion of enjoyment. McDonald writes, “It is above all in his visionary life
. . . that David achieves a measure of self-knowledge and aesthetic break-
through that culminate in loving ethical action.” The three central visions
that McDonald describes in the novel — Lurie’s “re-envisioning” of his
opera; the stream of images of women from his past during Melanie’s play;
and, at the end of the novel, Lurie’s vision of his daughter Lucy and the
possibility of a new life — all point to what McDonald calls “an ethic that
resituates desire in full recognition of the other.”

My first question is not only whether or not it is indeed “too late” for
David Lurie to redeem his vision, to transform it from sexual “use” to
higher “enjoyment,” for the sake of self-knowledge and ethical action, but
whether it is possible at all. That is, can a transformation of the nature of
vision — whether erotic, intellectual, or spiritual — constitute ethical
transformation? Does it have such resources in the novel or is it fundamen-

DISGRACE AND THE NEIGHBOR ! 95

tally limited, bound up with a model of knowledge that remains spectato-
rial (and even specular) and without either sufficient passivity or activity to
be transformative? And even if a certain possibility of subjective change
were available to David Lurie by means of vision, would it really have any
significance for political change in South Africa? Insofar as Lurie is the
central character and consciousness of the novel, we might expect the
question of whether or not his personal disgrace can lead to any kind of
redemptive grace to be key to the novel’s ethical or political significance.
Indeed, I would argue that Lurie’s personal path of penance as the loving
Angel of Death for abandoned animals is merely personal — rather than an
act meant to transform the world he lives in, it merely serves to change his
relationship to that world. Finally, Lurie’s subjective transformation, such
as it is, is not what the novel — or the reader — really cares about. Lurie
is a dead end, the last of a line. His grandchild will not be his, will not
transmit his culture or values, but will be part of something completely
unknowable and absolutely independent of him. I think it is clear that the
character of David Lurie changes to a certain extent over the novel, at least
in terms of his erotic objects; although he continues to frequent prostitutes
when inclined, he also has had a less illicit and pathetic, if still not quite
legitimate, relationship with a (married) woman of his own age, Bev, and
we are inclined to doubt that there will be many more Melanies in his life.
But all David has ever gained from relationships is “self-knowledge” as a
mode of intellectual narcissism and that is all that he seems to achieve by
the end of the book. It is fine for David to accomplish some measure of
understanding of himself, but such knowledge is not the same as transfor-
mation, and may not be an indication of real change — either on a per-
sonal or on a political level. Indeed, it may be an impediment to change,
an imaginary screen against a vision that David cannot face. “Love of the
neighbor,” we should recall, is not predicated on or conditioned by self-
knowledge, but self-love — and “love” must be taken, as both Richard of
St. Victor and Freud do, as intrinsically violent, ambivalent, and potentially
not only self-transformative, but transformative of a world. As McDonald
indicates, David Lurie’s characteristic vision at the beginning is erotic in a
detached, analytic mode; vision as sexual knowledge, we might say,
whether in evaluating his regular prostitute Soraya or Melanie, the young
student on whom he fixes his eye. Vision is the first moment of sexual
penetration for Lurie, and the end is possession, consumption, and finally
evacuation of the object. This kind of erotic vision is fully parallel with
Lurie’s literary critical methodology, which is again more about self-
knowledge than knowledge of something outside of himself, something
truly other. Lurie’s sexual and critical vision are both, we might say,
“jaded”: he sees merely what he has already seen, and there is nothing new
under the sun, merely variations on a theme (whether poetic, musical, or
feminine).

96 ! KENNETH REINHARD

The first of the three visions that McDonald describes in the novel
centers on David Lurie’s opera on Byron and Teresa Guiccioli; as
McDonald indicates, Lurie finds himself surprised by his own rewriting of
Teresa, who comes to resemble the middle-aged Bev, a comic figure, rather
than the sort of suggestible younger woman that is his usual fare. Whereas
Lurie had originally planned to “borrow” the melodies for his opera from
a composer such as Gluck, this revised Teresa now acts as his muse for the
composition of a simple, folk-based but original score. For McDonald, this
transformation of Teresa-as-Bev represents Lurie moving “beyond the
narcissism” that had prevented him from being open to something truly
other than himself. Nevertheless, as McDonald also writes, “she becomes
his guide to a new purpose, and a new self-understanding.” However, I
wonder if Lurie’s “self-understanding” is anything more than that: self-
understanding, a more intellectualized mode of his fundamental narcis-
sism? Is he not a character who, in this scene of re-visionary understanding
and the similar scenes that follow, merely comes to reflect more deeply on
himself? Do his visions ever show him anything other than himself, that is,
any other human being? Indeed, even his work at the animal shelter and
crematorium does not directly involve him with other people; it is as if he
does it for the sake of seeing himself as charitable, as relating to and offer-
ing loving service to another creature, even in a mode as violent as provid-
ing the mercy of an easy death to an unwanted animal.

The second sequence of Lurie’s visions remains just as solipsistic. In
his reading of the scene where David watches Melanie acting in Sunset at
the Globe Salon, McDonald argues that “David’s eye has been educated by
his reflections,” and he no longer sees Melanie as an object of sexual desire,
but more as “a surrogate daughter whose excellent performance he wishes
to take pride in.” This leads to a visionary sequence in which Lurie sud-
denly is flooded with “images of women he has known on two conti-
nents,” the women he has slept with and, sometimes, loved. McDonald
understands this image as “an empathetic rather than narcissistic upwelling”;
and even though he points to the irony in Lurie describing the women as
having all “enriched” him, using the same infelicitous word that he had
earlier used to justify his relationship with Melanie, McDonald neverthe-
less regards this sequence of visions as representative of authentic ethical
or spiritual progress, along the lines of the path described by Richard of St.
Victor. But once again it is simply Lurie himself who is the focus of this
“enrichment”: the women swirling in his vision like leaves, “a fair field of
folk” as Lurie puts it, quoting Piers Plowman and alluding to a tradition of
such visions in Homer, Dante, and elsewhere, are dancing on his private
stage, as supporting actresses or foils for, again, his self-discovery. Once
again, vision is a path of development, but one that has little to do with
the encounter with other people; once again Lurie is working out his own
psychodrama in a vision that is hardly his own, but borrowed from other

DISGRACE AND THE NEIGHBOR ! 97

writers and artists. Indeed, McDonald agrees that the vision has “limited
impact . . . on David’s action,” insofar as, upon leaving the theater, he
comes across a pathetic, drugged-out prostitute, even younger than
Melanie, and has sex with her. McDonald writes, “Plainly, even violently,
Coetzee refuses any idealization of David’s vision; by itself it is not enough.
But it may clear the ground for a more important new beginning with his
flesh and blood daughter, Lucy.”

There is little indication, however, that David Lurie’s increasing self-
knowledge, as demonstrated by this sequence of visions, has any conse-
quences beyond, well, self-knowledge. Has he become more ethical? Has
he changed in other than purely subjective ways? And even if his self-
reflection has indeed transformed his sense of himself, should we care? Is
Coetzee and the novel really very interested in David Lurie’s personal
transformation or lack thereof? Perhaps; but I believe that Lurie is some-
thing of a “lure” in the novel, a red herring that leads the unwary reader
into the trap of identification and the illusory assumption that a change of
vision is the same as a vision of change. We are likely to regard Lurie as
debauched or at least foolish and strangely self-destructive at the begin-
ning of the novel; but are not his attempts to connect with his estranged
and damaged daughter, his relationship with Bev, and his growing care for
abandoned animals, all presented to us as invitations to empathize and
even identify with him? There is no doubt that he has been “enriched” as
a character by these developments, but if we are satisfied by these signs of
his ethical growth, aren’t we also tacitly endorsing his unrepentant claim
that he has “enriched” Melanie by seducing her? And further, doesn’t this
slippery slope become even more unstable when we realize that such a
claim could similarly be made by Lucy’s rapists, if they were as educated as
Lurie — that they were merely “enriching” her? To understand the ques-
tion of his development as an ethical individual or as a literary character as
being central to the novel’s mythos and ethos is to remain within a para-
digm of subjectivity and responsibility that may not operate in the new
South Africa. David Lurie, I believe, will be left out of whatever brave new
world it is that Lucy’s child will be born into.2

The third vision that McDonald describes involves a painterly scene of
David watching his pregnant daughter, Lucy, working in her fields. Here
Lurie seems to accept Lucy’s decision to keep the child and to marry
Petrus, even accepting the fact that she will become a member of the same
family as the men who raped her. Lurie sees himself as the grandfather of
a new lineage that will derive from the birth, and convert its violent origins
into a new beginning, a new race mixing whites and blacks in South Africa
— even if his contribution to it will quickly dwindle and likely be forgot-
ten. So what do we make of Lurie’s vision of his daughter as a figure in a
painting, “a Sargent or Bonnard”? No longer does he see her in more or
less erotic terms, but as something more aestheticized and allegorical, “the

98 ! KENNETH REINHARD

eternal feminine” as he puts it, a sort of earth mother, or Principle of
Generation. “The truth is,” Coetzee writes, Lurie “has never had much of
an eye for rural life, despite all his reading of Wordsworth. Not much of an
eye for anything, except pretty girls; and where has that got him? Is it too
late to educate the eye?” (218). I think that we must take this as a real
question, not merely rhetorical; and I am inclined to respond, Yes — it is
too late for David Lurie, but for Lucy, her child, and South Africa, and
finally for us, the book’s readers, the question of David’s vision must be
subordinated to larger questions and concerns. In contemplating the scene
of the pregnant Lucy working in the fields, “becoming a peasant,” David
sees her world as a painting, a study in color and light, figure and ground;
he may not have had much of an eye for rural life, but with his daughter
at the center, allegorized and redeemed, he is happy to compose a pretty
picture of the future. And what about Lucy in this painterly scene? Is she
gazing into a brave new post-apartheid world on the horizon? No; she is
absorbed in the world in which she is living and working; she is making a
world, not painting one. After having watched his daughter from a dis-
tance, and self-consciously composing her as the subject of a painting,
Lurie finally breaks the “spell” he had cast by calling out to Lucy, and she
replies, surprised, “I didn’t hear you”; but she might have said, I didn’t see
you. And as if to suggest just this, the narrator remarks that Lucy’s dog,
Katy, “stares shortsightedly in his [Lurie’s] direction” (218). There is no
real place of significance for Lurie in Lucy’s future, in the future of South
Africa; she simply can’t see him. But more that this, she does not “see” in
a visionary sense at all: she is not a subject who imagines possible futures,
but she is fully caught up in the activities of making. And this may involve
a certain degree of willful blindness, both to the terrible past and to the
uncertain future.

The world that David Lurie gazes upon is what Heidegger calls a
“world picture,” an aestheticized and allegorically pre-interpreted image.3
It is true that he is not “in the picture,” but no matter: he is the artist who
has set up the picture and the subject for whom it is composed. For David,
vision always means seeing himself seeing: ultimately, whatever the object,
his vision is always for the sake of establishing himself as Seer. Lucy and her
offspring will always remain no more than an image for his eye, a moral for
his story, rather than fellow creatures with whom he may share a history
and a world. But this suggests another reading of the question “is it too
late to educate the eye?”: David’s eye and his consciousness dominate the
novel, and finally there is no redemption available for him. But it is perhaps
not too late to educate the reader’s eye, and this involves precisely breaking
with the perspective determined by Lurie, realizing that it is not exemplary
but a visual “lure,” the lure, precisely, of the visual. Finally, vision by itself,
no matter how redeemed or transfigured, no matter how spiritually or
historically informed, is not adequate to the requirements of a new South

DISGRACE AND THE NEIGHBOR ! 99

Africa; it is the visual opposition of “black” and “white,” after all, that was
the basis of apartheid’s regime. To build a new world, or to bring some-
thing radically new into the world (a child?), what is required is not vision
or knowledge, but, I would like to suggest, love, which, after all, is blind.

My second set of comments, which are connected with the first, have
to do with McDonald’s remarks on social love in the novel and on Richard
of St. Victor’s notion of condilectio and “violent love.” McDonald
describes Richard’s account of the mystical journey as “a path that empha-
sizes relationships with others and the importance of full community
where love may be enacted.” What Richard calls condilectio, “shared love,”
or neighbor love, implies the need for a third party who, as a common
object of love for two others, allows their love to achieve a more perfect
union without solipsism. Just as the trinitarian account of God requires a
triple unity of poles within the Godhead so that God can reflect on himself
by means of a mediating element, and in turn be fully loving, so human
relations need a third person in order to avoid specular dualism and to
transform love from a private to a social affect.

In French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s terms, condilectio would be
the love that breaks through the tendency to “imaginary” insularity for the
sake of a more authentically “symbolic” relationship, one based on differ-
ence and mediation rather than the immediacy of fusion. But for Lacan,
neighbor love ultimately aims at something else, a third element, neither
imaginary nor symbolic, but real. The neighbor as “real” implies the trau-
matic alterity that the other embodies or includes within him or herself, as
an “intimate exteriority” — the unfathomable desire of the other that is
more fundamental to the subject than its sense of self. For Lacan, “to love
our neighbor as our self” is to encounter what is most singularly strange
and disturbing in the other person, what is most rageful, perverse, or dis-
gusting, and unknowable, not available for empathy, not recognizable —
yet to acknowledge that dark abyss as the figure of our own unconscious
desire. In his seminar from 1959–60, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan
distinguishes the easy gestures of a “philanthropy,” the charity (if not
caritas) that imagines the other’s desires and needs on the model of one’s
own, from a more radical possibility of loving the neighbor. Lacan draws
on the example of the fourth-century bishop, Saint Martin of Tours, who
famously shares his cloak with a naked beggar he happens upon, as a
negative exemplum of neighbor love, beyond the ethics of the Good:

As long as it’s a question of the good, there no problem; our own and
our neighbor’s are of the same material. Saint Martin shares his cloak, and
a great deal is made of it. Yet it is after all a simple question of training;
material is by its very nature made to be disposed of — it belongs to the
other as much as it belongs to me. We are no doubt touching a primitive
requirement in the need to be satisfied there, for the beggar is naked. But
perhaps over and above that need to be clothed, he was begging for

100 ! KENNETH REINHARD

something else, namely that Saint Martin kill him or fuck him. In any
encounter there’s a big difference in meaning between the response of
philanthropy and that of love.4

Lacan’s critique of Saint Martin’s gesture, as characteristic of a certain
mode of ethical reason and moral utilitarianism, is that it remains at the
level of the other’s need, never touching on the question of desire — on
what the other is lacking on a more fundamental level. It is of course of
primary importance to recognize the purely animal requirements of every
human being — clothing, shelter, food, etc. — but the response to the
neighbor in terms of such needs does not require my encounter with what
is truly other in the other, and in that sense is not really what Lacan means
by ethical. In fact such a gesture risks acting as a screen designed precisely
to conceal from myself what might be disturbing in the other, what Lacan
calls the other’s jouissance: its strange, unfathomable “enjoyment,” intrin-
sically transgressive and singularly human, and profoundly more difficult
to address than animal needs. Lacan’s notion of the neighbor’s jouissance
is by no means identical with Richard of St. Victor’s Augustinian account
of condilectio as “enjoyment,” but in both cases the relationship to the
other is understood as non-instrumental, as an absolute end in itself, and
as addressed to something that exceeds my possibilities of vision or knowl-
edge and may in fact undermine my most fundamental self-certainties. The
love of the neighbor that Lacan goes on to describe in the acts of other
(women) saints involves incorporating the horror of the other: joyfully
eating the excrement of a sick man, drinking water in which a leper’s feet
had been washed, etc. These are not acts of “perversion” according to
Lacan, but on a fundamental level, acts of neighbor love, attempts to love
the other person not in spite of what is most horrific and vile in them, but
precisely for that horror, as the sign of their alterity, which is elevated to
the status of a sublime object.

Can we see Lucy’s response to her rape and impregnation as a version
of neighbor love? Is her willingness to marry Petrus and to merge her life
with those of her assailants a kind of loving-kindness that has nothing to
do with religious obligation or social necessity, but enacts a fully conscious
and self-willed decision? There is clearly no “identification with the aggres-
sor” going on here; Lucy does not see herself as “like” Petrus’s family, does
not make herself one of them, will clearly always remain outside, even
when she lives within Petrus’s walls and sleeps between his sheets. Indeed,
she does not will herself to see him as “my neighbor” — there is no act of
charity, no Christian self-abasement in her action. Can we even suggest
that her decision is a response to a call she has heard — a call not from
some transcendental source, but from the boys who have raped her, a reply
to their obscene, perverse, cruel acts of neighbor love?

In the post-apartheid South Africa of Disgrace, the relationship that
best describes the situation of blacks and whites is that of neighbors, with

DISGRACE AND THE NEIGHBOR ! 101

all its complex ambivalence, and all its sense of ethical or political impera-
tive. Already before the rape, the relationship between Lucy and Petrus
was complicated; certainly not one of master and servant, nor exactly one
of friendship. But after the rape, with David’s lingering question of
whether Petrus was in some way complicit with the crime, and Petrus’s
emerging independence and unpredictability, things have changed:

In the old days one could have had it out with Petrus. In the old days one
could have had it out to the extent of losing one’s temper and sending
him packing and hiring someone in his place. But though Petrus is paid
a wage, Petrus is no longer, strictly speaking, hired help. It is hard to say
what Petrus is, strictly speaking. The word that seems to serve best, how-
ever, is neighbour. Petrus is a neighbour who at present happens to sell
his labour. He sells his labour under contract, unwritten contract, and
that contract makes no provision for dismissal on grounds of suspicion. It
is a new world they live in, he and Lucy and Petrus. Petrus knows it, and
he knows it, and Petrus knows that he knows it. (116–17)

The relationship of neighbors is bound more by unwritten and tacit agree-
ments than by written law or explicit rules. Its rules are local rather than
universal, and are constantly evolving, constantly reformulated, for the
sake of maintaining equilibrium and a certain possibility of openness
between worlds that allows for the inhabitation of any particular world.
The situation of a neighborhood is singular and contingent: one does not
usually settle in a place because of one’s neighbors, nor does one usually
leave simply to escape particular neighbors. When violations of the unwrit-
ten agreements that regulate neighborhoods become intolerable, the level
of aggressivity tends to escalate, since there is no clear path to outside
adjudication. But the neighbor is also the object of an injunction in
Judaism and Christianity, to love your neighbor as yourself; and this com-
mandment confronts the ambiguous and ambivalent actual relationship
with the neighbor, always provisional, always contingent, with a transcen-
dental moral imperative — the imperative, precisely, to come closer to that
strange contingency.

I think that McDonald is absolutely right in suggesting that Richard
of St. Victor’s writings on social love are central to Coetzee’s understand-
ing of the issues faced by his characters in his novel, and the novel as such.
Perhaps the novel’s central question for post-apartheid South Africa can be
articulated most simply as a variation of the lawyer’s question to Jesus in
the parable of the Good Samaritan: who is my neighbor? What does it
mean to love my neighbor? Neighbor love in post apartheid South Africa
may indeed be a “violent love,” one that is fundamentally ambivalent,
essentially mixed with hate, but one that may lead to a new kind of social
relationship. This is not to say that Coetzee has romanticized the violence
of neighbor love as the “necessary” price that the white South Africans
must pay for their long oppression of the black South Africans. Although

102 ! KENNETH REINHARD

it is never completely clear how Lucy herself regards her rape and marriage,
it is never portrayed or imagined as a “just” violence that must be accepted
as penance for the years of apartheid and other forms of institutional vio-
lence. Rather, as Lucy understands it, and Coetzee seems to concur, the
rape is simply violence, motivated by pure, personal hatred, and as such
unredeemable. It is not the price that must be paid, the retributive justice
that will allow for the annealing of the country’s wounds. But however
non-signifying the event of the rape itself was, however blind was its fury,
reasonless its commission, even with the weight of history and suffering
that seems to unleash it, Lucy’s decision to accept the child that has
resulted from it has consequences. The outcome is unforeseeable, not
without risk, not necessarily for the good; but her decision is absolutely her
own. And it is not motivated, as far as we can tell, by anything like self-
reflection, self-knowledge, self-interest, or any other mode of vision. It is
as if Lucy gazes blindly into the future, neither confident nor despairing;
she acts but does not know the consequences of her action. That is, her act
exceeds calculation, its results are infinite, and in this sense it opens the
space for something truly new to emerge in the world.

In Coetzee’s recent book, Diary of a Bad Year, the opening section
entitled “The Origin of the State” interrupts a meditation on the nature
of citizenship and subjection with a series of encounters between the
writer-narrator and his younger female neighbor. A half-imagined open-
ing conversation between them centers on the question of urban neigh-
boring: “I live on the ground floor and have since 1995 and still I don’t
know all my neighbours, I said. Yeah, she said, and no more, meaning,
Yes, I hear what you say and I agree, it is tragic not to know who your neigh-
bours are, but that is how it is in the big city and I have other things to attend
to now, so could we let the present exchange of pleasantries die a natural
death.”5 The narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with this attractive
neighbor, and his interchanges with her continue to punctuate his reflec-
tions on politics and ethics. In the section “On Machiavelli,” Coetzee
takes up the question of what it is that allows the common man, our most
generic neighbor, to hold fundamentally contradictory political and ethi-
cal positions:

The kind of person who calls talkback radio and justifies the use of torture
in the interrogation of prisoners holds the double standard in his mind in
exactly the same way: without in the least denying the absolute claims of
the Christian ethic (love thy neighbour as thyself), such a person approves
freeing the hands of the authorities — the army, the secret police — to
do whatever may be necessary to protect the public from enemies of the
state. (18)

The “typical reaction of liberal intellectuals” to this, according to
Coetzee, is to simply see it as a contradiction, an impossible position,

DISGRACE AND THE NEIGHBOR ! 103

incoherent. But Coetzee argues that this belief in a necessity that can com-
mand incompatible moral and political positions is a defining characteris-
tic of modernity. Yes, this member of the talk radio hoi polloi seems to
insist, we must love our neighbor; and yes, this may include at times the
necessity of torturing our neighbor, if he is also the enemy of the state.
Coetzee argues that one cannot counter this by claiming higher moral
ground or the virtues of political-ethical consistency. “Rather,” he writes,
“you must attack the metaphysical, supra-empirical status of necessità and
show that to be fraudulent.” The problem is not simply that we have
ambivalent attitudes towards and contradictory beliefs about our neigh-
bors, that we do not know the difference between “loving” and “tortur-
ing” them, but that we treat our relationships to other people as bound
by one or another mode of necessity. Our relationship to our neighbor is
not ruled by necessity, but is fundamentally contingent. If there is an
imperative that verges on necessity in the command to love the neighbor,
it is the necessity of contingency — that is, you must love your neighbor as
yourself, whatever that might mean in a particular situation. And that is
something that cannot be determined in advance, cannot be codified, any
more than can the vagaries of neighboring. It is a universal rule, a cate-
gorical imperative, but one that does not operate according to the
assumption that it will provide a guide to ethical behavior or a moral rule
that could be predictive or prescriptive.

Finally, there is no room in the new world that Lucy is helping build
for Lurie and his visions; there is no moral education that can redeem his
eye — there is no place for the mode of vision and knowledge that are
intrinsic to Lurie’s way of being in the world. The neighbor love that Lucy
has embraced, as a real possibility, a serious act and ongoing labor, requires
a certain blindness or abandonment of vision, the knowledge it implies, and
the subjective position it assumes. But this does not mean that Lurie can-
not find personal redemption — it just doesn’t matter to anyone, nor
should it. Lurie’s redemption comes in the form of the service he assumes
of euthanizing sick or unwanted pets. Earlier in the novel, we are told that
what the people who leave their dogs and cats with the Animal Welfare
clinic really want is not for them to be “killed,” but simply and naïvely that
they “disappear”: “What is being asked for is, in fact, Lösung (German
always to hand with an appropriately blank abstraction): sublimation, as
alcohol is sublimated from water, leaving no residue, no aftertaste” (142).
This characterization of the desire to dispose of the animals as simply the
need to find an answer, a Lösung, to their problem without nasty moral
residue is clearly criticized as an ethical failure, an act of denial of the pain-
ful realities entailed by our responsibility for animals, and perhaps even
hints at the “final solution to the Jewish problem” (Endlösung der
Judenfrage) proposed by the Nazis. By the end of the book, however,
Lurie has found another way of understanding his work of animal eutha-

104 ! KENNETH REINHARD

nasia; it is still the execution of a solution, a work of “Lösung” — but now
he also understands that this is indeed a euphemism; now “he no longer
has difficulty in calling [the killing] by its proper name: love” (219). For
Lurie the killing is no longer a Lösung, a “solution,” but an act of Erlösung
— that is, redemption, in the sense of release, ransom, or even deliverance
in a messianic sense. Whatever personal redemption Lurie achieves at the
end of the novel is not by means of vision, but by love, a kind of neighbor
love that does not exclude violence but, in his case, even requires it. But
the mode of neighbor love that Lurie discovers does not involve him
directly in the world of his daughter, her new family, and the new world
they are creating (also not without violence). Indeed, that world remains
only a picture to him. Lurie’s neighbors are the animals to whom he gives
a gentle death, and the world that he finds for himself in this work remains,
as Heidegger would say, poor. This is not to scorn the work or the world
that it involves; indeed, it is an authentic act of love, albeit a modest one.
Not an act of world building, but perhaps for the first time in his life,
something real.

Notes
1 In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine writes, “Some things are to be enjoyed,
others to be used, and there are others which are to be enjoyed and used . . . To
enjoy something is to cling to it with love for its own sake. To use something,
however, is to employ it in obtaining that which you love. . . . Thus in this our
mortal life, wandering from God, if we wish to return to our native country
where we can be blessed we should use this world and not enjoy it . . . The
things which are to be enjoyed are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,”
9–10.
2 Mark Sanders suggests that Lurie’s seduction of Melanie, as well as the rape of
Lucy, can be understood as acts of “manic-reparative colonial phantasy.” But these
attempts at “reparations” are undermined not only by the violence that they neces-
sarily involve, but by a resistance to closure that is expressed in the novel’s gram-
mer. Sanders traces the distinction in Disgrace between the functions of tense and
“aspect” — the relative perfection or imperfection, completion or incompleteness,
of an act, as in the series “burned, burnt, burnt up” — and argues that the novel
uses imperfection to suspend closure and the possibility of a transcendental futurity.
See Sanders 2007, 168–85.
3 In his essay “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger writes, “The fundamen-
tal event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as a picture” . . . “Where
the world becomes picture, what is, in its entirety, is juxtaposed as that for which
man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he therefore intends to bring before
himself and have set before himself . . . Hence world picture, when understood
essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and

DISGRACE AND THE NEIGHBOR ! 105

grasped as a picture.” To have a “world view,” a vision of the world as a picture, is
to see it as composed, ordered, and flattened; structured as a picture set up for us,
framed and presented as an object for the speculative eye (Heidegger 1977, 134;
129).
4 See Lacan, 186. Also see Reinhard 1997.
5 Diary of a Bad Year, 5.

3: “Is it too late to educate the eye?”:
David Lurie, Richard of St. Victor,
and “vision as eros” in Disgrace

Bill McDonald

In your own Bosom you bear your Heaven
And earth, & all that you behold, tho’ it appears Without, it is Within
In your Imagination, of which this world of Mortality is but Shadow.

— Blake, Jerusalem

DAVID LURIE’S PAST IS LARGELY A BLANK SLATE to readers of Disgrace. We know only a few things about his academic career, and even less
about his upbringing, marriages, politics, and religion. We do learn, in a
fast-moving paragraph, that David was raised “in a family of women. As
mother, aunts, sisters fell away, they were replaced in due course by mis-
tresses, wives, a daughter. The company of women made him a lover of
women and, to an extent, a womanizer. . . . That was how he lived for
years, for decades, that was the backbone of his life” (7). Mothers and
sisters, aunts and wives, then a little later “tourists” and “wives of col-
leagues” (7) appear, then immediately “fall away” from our view, with
only Rosalind, wife number two, surviving the sentences that created her.
We are left largely with surmises: that he received some musical educa-
tion, went somewhere to graduate school, has taught for something like
a quarter of a century, and thought a photograph of his mother as a
young woman worth displaying (15). It’s hard to imagine him with sis-
ters.

We also know that David wrote and published three books in earlier
phases of his academic career. None of them “caused a stir or even a rip-
ple” (4). Though he is “tired of criticism” now, these books that he wrote
about “dead people” once commanded his “heart” (162). It gradually
becomes clear that the subjects of these books, though unremarked by
David’s peers, have remained very much in play in his consciousness and
especially his subliminal life, inaugurating, even shaping, aspects of his

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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 65
present experience. Two of them — Boito and the Faust Legend: The
Genesis of Mefistofele, and Wordsworth and the Burden of the Past — do so
in immediately apparent ways; the slow evolution of David’s own opera on
Byron and Teresa Guiccioli runs throughout the story, and his specializa-
tion in Romanticism — “Wordsworth has been one of my masters” (13)
— yields the two classroom scenes we visit, as well as several other impor-
tant passages in his narrative. Sandwiched in between, however, is a seem-
ingly anomalous project, The Vision of Richard of St. Victor. The writings
of an ascetic Scots contemplative in a medieval French monastery seem
well removed from David’s artistic interests and melancholy secularism;
though David may satirize his students’ “post-Christian” attitudes (32),
he seems to share them (for example, 172). Yet as a young scholar David
Lurie thought enough of Richard’s work to devote an entire book to him,
a task that required considerable time, a mastery of Latin and the com-
plexities of medieval theology, and at least some sympathy with the con-
templative life. “Vision as eros” is his book’s theme, and while Lurie tells
us nothing else directly about his interpretation, Richard’s writing, like
Boito’s opera and Wordsworth’s poetry, becomes an intriguing intertext
in David’s psychic life, giving the reader another, and even more venera-
ble, set of frames for following his journey. Richard’s visionary passion also
runs under the surface of Coetzee’s novel, helping to shape its affirmation
of what he elsewhere calls “mystical intuition,”1 and weaving that vision-
ary experience into the aesthetics and the ethics of Disgrace. Coetzee’s
Latin, “the only language I studied at university,” stood him in good
stead.2
First, a few general things about Richard’s accounts of the visionary
as they affect Disgrace. His descriptions anticipate, and resemble, the
accounts of many later visionaries; in addition to Richard, David himself
cites Dante, Langland, Byron, Blake, Wordsworth, Yeats, and Rilke. They
also resemble the intuited beginnings of fictions that many writers have
recounted: the mysterious appearance of a gesture, a voice, a character in
motion from “outside” consciousness. In addition, the visionary con-
nects with the ethical choices that David makes at the end of his story; it
leads to, but doesn’t compel, those decisions. To elaborate just a little,
the visionary elements are not in themselves decisive or completing; nei-
ther David nor the novel ends with a vision. They enrich David’s self-
understanding but also highlight some unchanging, and unwelcome,
qualities of his character. The novel insists on open-endedness, both
because it sees character change as real but always partial, and because the
novel itself illuminates, then rejects, any definitive authority. Finality — in
vision, in character, in ethical action — is a fiction this fiction stands
against.
In what follows I argue that the visionary, the aesthetic, and the ethical
are interwoven in the book in ways vital to its meanings.
Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
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66 ! BILL MCDONALD
II, i
Richard (d. 1173), associate of Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas of
Canterbury and successor of the more famous Hugh of St. Victor, holds a
significant place in Catholic mystical thinking. He was known as the
“Magnus Contemplator,” after his treatise “De Contemplatione,” which
Dante mentions in the Paradiso as putting forward “all that a mere man
can see, and more” (X, 131–32, Ciardi translation). His writings were
actively sought out by other monasteries, praised by St. Bonaventure, and
included not only contemplative subjects but pedagogic ones as well; like
his master Hugh, he wrote specifically to instruct as well as to reveal (St.
Victor’s teaching program was copied throughout Europe).3 The narrative
of Jacob and his family in Genesis provided the scaffold upon which he
built a remarkable account of contemplation, while his familiarity with St.
Augustine’s writings shaped its terminology and modes of argument.
Richard is read today largely for three texts: Twelve Patriarchs or
Benjamin Minor: Of the preparation of the soul for contemplation; The
Mystical Ark or Benjamin Major: Of the grace of contemplation; and for his
remarkable work on the Trinity.4 The first two titles are taken from Psalm
67 (68 in the KJV and RSV), where Jacob’s youngest son Benjamin, “the
least of them” (ibi Beniamin parvulus continens eos), leads the solemn vic-
tory procession of God’s faithful into the sanctuary. In the Benjamin
Minor Richard aligns himself with the tradition of allegorizing not only
Benjamin’s position as the youngest son, but Jacob’s entire family, assign-
ing a stage or “discipline” in spiritual development to his wives Leah and
Rachel, their handmaidens, and the birth order of his thirteen children. So,
Dan (judgment) and Naphtali (conversion) defend the soul (Benjamin
Minor, 17–22), Issachar expresses its joy and reward (37–39), Dina its
shame (45–59), Joseph its discretion (67–72), and Benjamin the ecstasy of
contemplation and interior visions of light (71–75, 82–87). Richard for-
mulates the basic distinction between reason, “by which we distinguish
things,” and affection, “by which we love,” in this way: “These are the two
wives of the rational spirit, from which honorable offspring and heirs of the
kingdom of heaven are born. Right counsels are born from reason; holy
longings from affection” (3). Longing is identified with Leah, who strug-
gles to move past the pleasure of worldly objects, while Rachel, the alle-
gorical embodiment of reason, prepares the way for the trans-rational
visions that only her son Benjamin can achieve. Richard works each of
these figures in many ways; his allegories are subtle, not reductive or naïve
as this quick summary might suggest. Each stage involves a material or
historical event, and an accompanying symbolic event in the spirit. These
offer a path not only to seminarians, but to any individuals seeking spiritual
insight into their own experience; Richard wishes to show the way to a
large audience. Self-consciously citing Christ’s example, Richard sees him-
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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 67
self as a committed teacher as well as thinker (“Learn from me, because I
am gentle and lowly in heart).5 His path repeats a familiar, even archetypal,
journey in Western mysticism: from immediate sensuous experience
through the complex stages of mental apprehension and meditation —
what we would call psychology — to the many layers of contemplation.
(These stages align with the many secular accounts given by verbal artists
of their creative process.) Self-knowledge is a necessary achievement for
the contemplative life, and Richard describes the many difficulties and
limitations in the way of that achievement. Finally, it is a path that empha-
sizes relationships with others and the importance of full community
where love may be enacted. That love (charity) may be “violent” (De
Quatuor gradibus violentiae amoris: On the Four Degrees of Violent
Charity), but after its “wounding, binding and languishing” we arrive at
the soul reborn (paragraphs 42–47) as it takes on the form of Christ’s
humility and servanthood, becoming all things to all men . . .” (DeQuator,
#42–47; Zinn, 9).
II, ii
Among the most telling of Richard’s analyses for Disgrace comes in chap-
ters 45–49 of Benjamin Minor, where he develops a model of shame.
Ironically, Richard writes more about Jacob’s oft-neglected only daughter
Dina (Dinah) than any of her brothers except Joseph and Benjamin, mark-
ing shame as a virtue of serious import in his schema.6 He has a number
of things to say about shame and disgrace that resonate with Coetzee’s
novel.7 Shame, first, requires the right timing to be powerful, underlining
the violence of the process. It requires “hatred” of whatever act led to the
person’s shame. It has two stages: the lower one of public exposure; and
the higher, spiritually more potent one of internal shame of one’s act.
These are stages that David clearly moves through. His disgrace comes
just at the moment that his belief in any meaningful future collapses (for
example, 7, 11, 58). His public disgrace comes well before his interior
acceptance of it. While David never “hates” the desire that led to his dis-
grace, after Lucy’s rape he does fully acknowledge the offense he commit-
ted against the Isaacs family (163–74, especially 173). Part of the higher
shame is an awareness of one’s own moral depletion, something that David
gradually comes to acknowledge.
One of “virtuous shame’s” characteristics is the ability to not feel
shame if “you should be compelled to pass before a multitude with a nude
body” (47). Richard contrasts this to being “defiled in the mind by an
impure thought,” a spiritual nudity that, in the right-spirited should pro-
duce more shame than public nakedness. Such shame is rare in Richard’s
accounting, and far up the ladder of inner virtue his students are mount-
Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
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68 ! BILL MCDONALD
ing. Dinah “is that judgment by which everyone is by his own conscience
addressed, convicted, condemned and punished with a punishment worthy
of the disorder” (48). Shame requires self-consciousness, and is “marve-
lous” and universal; in spiritual shame the judge and judged, the punisher
and punished, become one. Disgrace, then, is a particular kind of virtue,
not simply an abasement; it contains within itself, literally and figuratively,
a potential of grace.
An important initial step toward this virtuous shame lies in David’s
superficially surprising reaction to his colleagues’ ridicule, the dunce-cap
newspaper photograph, and so on. He never seems to suffer the crushing
humiliations of public unmasking that many men in his position might
feel. He can tell his story with relative ease to his colleagues, and to
Rosalind, Bev, even to Lucy. This is because his disgrace grows out of two
things: his self-satisfying desire, which in the novel’s early pages he prizes
above all else; and its near opposite: the despair he feels at having no future
— pedagogic, familial, scholarly, artistic, and especially erotic — that
unmasking might damage. There is no “public” whose opinion his life’s
meaning depends upon. And this in turn makes David more open to dis-
grace’s virtue: an internal, spiritual condition in which he resides, and of
which he will never entirely be free.
II, iii
Ethics is the arena in which the claims of otherness — the moral law,
the human other, cultural norms, the good-in-itself, etc. — are artic-
ulated and negotiated.
— Geoffrey Harpham, Shadows of Ethics
Dinah, of course, is a rape victim in Genesis, assaulted by Sichem, son of
Emor. Richard allegorizes these two Shechemites as “Love of Vain
Glory” and “Love of One’s Own Excellence,” since they willingly cir-
cumcise themselves for Dinah (not God), glorying in their shame.
Richard’s idealized, “feminine” descriptions of “beautiful” Dinah, how-
ever, seem almost an inversion, a predictably pre-feminist inversion, of
Lucy. And any allegorical connection between the two Shechemites and
Lucy’s three assailants seems remote or perverse, though her attackers
could be construed as fathers and son, and could well be said to “glory
in their shame” of humiliating a woman whose ancestors had humiliated
them. But Lucy’s experience of disgrace, her withdrawal into a private
world, does form an illuminating connection with Richard’s portrait of
Dinah as “that judgment” (48). This is not the more public judgment
allegorized in her brother Dan, but a particular form of interior self-
evaluation. Just so, Lucy’s shame is of a particular, subtle kind: not the
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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 69
public shame of rape itself, as she might have had to endure in a fully
patriarchal world, but a disgrace connected with the post-apartheid inter-
regnum in which she lives, and which only she can feel.8 Lucy’s silent
self-judgment castigates her own idealizations of a new, harmonious rural
South Africa, where hard work and neighborly cooperation could leave
both her commune days and apartheid’s violence behind. Her naïveté is
encapsulated in the novel’s most suspenseful moment, when she chooses
to lock up her two Dobermans while her assaulters look on. In her zeal
not to be racist, to help bring about the new era through her trusting
actions, Lucy exposes herself to the “personal hatred” of her rapists; she
is not just an abstract “white person” or even “white woman” to them,
she feels later, but an object of immediate, intimate hatred. Harassed by
her father, who wants to control her life story as he had when she was a
child (for example, 89, 105, 198), Lucy slowly, and quietly, develops her
own well-tempered narrative, judging that she must endure the personal,
inward shame of rape and untutored optimism in order to gain peace,
continuation, and the Petrus-guaranteed safe boundaries of her house
(208).
II, iv
In The Mystical Ark Richard isolates six modes of contemplation (I: 6) and
develops a tropological (ethical, and also visionary) taxonomy of those
modes. The lower stages outline the interrelationships of imagination and
reason, the final two moving “above,” then “beyond” reason to ecstasy. All
are seen, finally, as manifestations of the divine, with the high spiritual
world of the Trinity at the apex of the six stages. Further, any object what-
soever can become a proper object for contemplation.
At first this rapturous Christianity might seem to exclude David Lurie,
who, a few undeveloped references to pre-existing souls and God aside,
seems little drawn to the divine. Lurie’s understanding of vision, further,
is certainly mediated through “my master” Wordsworth and the Romantics,
to whom he has devoted the largest part of his scholarship and teaching.
Nonetheless, Richard’s way of seeing, and his accounts of contemplative
states, make their way into David’s experience, and into the novel’s tex-
ture. They flow along with, even anchor, the more familiar visionary com-
pany of the poets. They also present the life of contemplation as objective
and universal, not simply personal and idiosyncratic: a making substantial
that Coetzee hopes for in his fiction as well.9 Finally, Richard’s account of
the visionary includes, but is not limited to, momentary epiphanies, the
legendary “flash of insight”; the contemplative life also takes place in time
and over time.10 It is narrative as well as lyric, both of which will figure in
David’s history.
Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
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70 ! BILL MCDONALD
In his excellent introductory monograph to his edition of Richard’s
writings, translator Grover A. Zinn gives a concise summary of Richard’s
great subject: “By contemplation Richard means an attitude of mind, a
state of beholding.” He defines contemplation as “. . . the free, more pen-
etrating gaze of a mind, suspended with wonder concerning manifestations
of wisdom” (The Mystical Ark, I: 4). Zinn continues:
Contemplation . . . is an attentive or eager looking at. Above all it must
be clearly understood that contemplation is not some sort of mental proc-
ess. Richard . . . is careful to distinguish thinking (a rather rambling
consideration of many things without purpose) . . . from the act of con-
templating. The contemplative act itself is an intent beholding focused
upon a single object or cluster of objects presented to the mind by
imagination, reason or the pure understanding that alone has access to
divine things. . . . The purpose of contemplation is not thinking about
something . . . but “adhering with wonder to the object that brings it
joy” (I: 4). It is nondiscussive and unified. It enjoys rather than uses. It
rests rather than acts. (23–24)
Once his conception of contemplation is clear, Richard goes on to posit
biblical personifications, urging the novice contemplative to substitute
himself for, imagine himself as, a great biblical figure. Each of these figures
— and he includes a great variety, from Abraham to the Queen of Sheba
— exemplifies a distinctive stage of contemplative realization. Richard also
insists that at least some of the objects of contemplation, though not the
highest, can be “brought down for the understanding of all” (IV, 12). In
so claiming he continues his pedagogic emphasis from Benjamin Minor,
establishing an ethical practice.
Beyond all this, however, lies the fundamental feature of Richard’s
inquiry into contemplation: the reservoir of erotic metaphors and allego-
ries that charge and enliven his work. Beyond Jacob and his family, “The
Song of Songs” suffuses much of Richard’s writing, and the traditional
figures of bride and bridegroom for the soul and God take on special savor
in his formulations. Naturally this is a sublimated eros, an eros marking
love, and also desire and longing, in their widest applications, but Richard
doesn’t shy away from the explicitly sexual in the rapture of his vision.11
Here is a representative example, one that might almost serve as an outline
of the later stages of David’s difficult spiritual journey:
And so when the soul enters with her Beloved into the bedchamber, she
alone delaying and enjoying the sweetness with Him alone . . . she forgets
all external things and delights in supreme and intimate love of Him. She
sees herself, alone with the Beloved, when, after having forgotten all
exterior things, she aims her longing away from consideration of herself
and toward love of her Beloved. And on account of these things that she
considers in her inmost places, she kindles her soul with such affection
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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 71
and rises up with thanksgiving from the consideration of both her goods
and her evils. . . . Think what is in your life that you have loved more
ardently, craved more anxiously; what affected you more pleasantly and
delighted you more deeply than all other things. Consider, therefore, if
you feel the same force of affection and abundance of delight when you
burn with longing for the supreme Lover and when you rest in His love.
Who doubts that He does not yet occupy that innermost recess of your
affections if the dart of intimate love pierces your soul less and excites it
less fervently in divine affections than it was accustomed to penetrate and
excite it sometimes with respect to alien affections? (Benjamin Major, IV,
16)
Also important for Disgrace is Richard’s late treatise on the Trinity,
whose third book develops an ingenious argument for a Three-in-One
God based on the principle of active love, or charity:
When one person gives love to another and he alone loves only the other,
there certainly is love [dilectio] but it is not a shared love [condilectio].
When two love each other mutually and give to each other the affection
of supreme longing; when the affection of the first goes out to the second
and the affection of the second goes out to the first and tends as it were
in diverse ways — in this case there certainly is love on both sides, but it
is not shared love. Shared love is properly said to exist when a third per-
son is loved by two persons harmoniously and in community, and the
affection of the two persons is fused into one affection by the flame of
love for the third. From these things it is evident that shared love would
have no place in Divinity itself if a third person were lacking to the other
two persons.12
In order for God to be fully charitable, fully loving, he must be tripartite.
Richard extends this interpretation to the human community, which also
requires a third person to be complete. This recondite “vision as eros” with
its “flame of love” and preference for threesomes will inform several of the
novel’s many triangular relationships, particularly the final one at the
book’s close.
Necessarily, Richard’s overt allegories and unself-conscious erotic
celebrations do not appear directly in Coetzee’s rigorously self-moni-
toring novel. Instead Coetzee gives us fiction in which the allegorical
is fluid rather than fixed, and which constantly scrutinizes its own foun-
dations. Fredric Jameson’s succinct account of the first of these permu-
tations of allegory, often endorsed by Coetzee’s critics, can help us
along:
The newer allegory is horizontal rather than vertical: if it must still attach
its one-on-one conceptual labels to its objects after the fashion of The
Pilgrim’s Progress, it does so in the conviction that those objects (along
with their labels) are now profoundly relational, indeed are themselves
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72 ! BILL MCDONALD
construed by their relations to each other. When we add to this the
inevitable mobility of such relations, we begin to glimpse the process of
allegorical interpretation as a kind of scanning that, moving back and
forth across the text, readjusts its terms in constant modification of a type
quite different from our stereotypes of some static medieval or biblical
decoding.13
This account brilliantly summarizes an important part of Coetzee’s prac-
tice in Disgrace. Think, for example, of the book’s multifarious triangles,
or of how our view of Bev Shaw shifts registers from just another
“dumpy woman” in David’s catalog to a rescuing angel. It is also con-
sonant with the novel’s refusal of finality in its characters’ lives or in its
own ethical position. Working in this mode, Coetzee turns the gap
between Richard’s spiritual universe and our own to his artistic advan-
tage; any resonant eros-vision now surprises both character and reader,
appearing dramatically in a world from which such things have long
since been discounted by tough-minded realists such as Lucy, David,
and, presumably, the reader. The surprise creates an authority, giving us
a sense of a voice from elsewhere — not necessarily the “higher” else-
where of traditional allegory — and that authority in turn sustains alle-
gorical meaning. In this way Richard’s visionary insights make their way
into Coetzee’s novel, further developing the similarities between reli-
gious and artistic visions. He draws on the “horizontal” allegory favored
by postmodernism but in a way that maintains a shadow version of
Richard’s confident practice. Coetzee’s allegory is arguably more impor-
tant for his political and ethical purposes than for his exploration of the
visionary, but it plays a vital part here as well. It also gives us a way to
see the history of the visionary.
Within these frames I shall show that David’s major visions are charged
with the erotic energy Richard celebrated, and that the allegorical and
intertextual triumphalism of his treatises leaves its mark on David’s artistic
and ethical life even as it once occupied his scholarly life. For example, he
comes to re-see his imagined Teresa Guiccioli as an allegorical figure whom
he tries to emulate; no longer the young girl he forcibly shaped in early
drafts, she metamorphoses into a “dumpy little widow” who paradoxically
becomes his teacher about love and longing (181–85, 213–14). Second,
Richard’s writings also touch Disgrace itself, not only its main character. As
we have seen, Richard’s elaborate “personification allegory” of Jacob’s
daughter Dinah — her shame via rape — underwrites Lucy’s tragedy, and
Richard’s claims about the psychology of shame and disgrace color the
novel’s exploration of those subjects. Most important, however, are two
related topics that lie at the heart of David Lurie and the fiction that gives
him voice: love and the visionary. “Vision as eros”: what David has sought
his entire life, from his “womanizing” days and practiced urban gaze to the
transforming visions near the end of his narrative, and where for David and
Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 73
Disgrace itself the aesthetic, spiritual, and ethical come together — at least
for a time.
III
Stories, whether written as novels or scripted as plays, connect the
visible with the invisible, the present with the past. They propose life
as something with moral consequence. They distribute the suffering
so that it can be borne . . .
— E. L. Doctorow. From the introduction to
Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993–2006
Throughout his writing career J. M. Coetzee has explored the visionary.
His leading characters all experience powerful visions, from Jacobus
Coetzee of Dusklands and Magda of In the Heart of the Country (“What I
lack in experience I plainly make up for in vision . . .” [42]) through the
Magistrate of Waiting for the Barbarians, with his recurring dream-visions
of children and his fantasy of flying, all the way to Elizabeth Costello. The
heroine of Age of Iron, Elizabeth Curren, has at least twenty such experi-
ences over the course of her story. Many of these are brief and, to repeat,
closely resemble other artists’ accounts of the intuitions that launched their
work. Others are more extended and intertextual, creating an overt or,
more often, an unspoken dialogue with an earlier text. In Youth (2002)
Coetzee narrativizes his own visionary experience as a young man in
London, lying alone on Hampstead Heath:
Tired out, one Sunday afternoon, he folds his jacket into a pillow,
stretches out on the greensward, and sinks into a sleep or half-sleep in
which consciousness does not vanish but continues to hover. It is a state
he has not known before: in his very blood he seems to feel the steady
wheeling of the earth. The faraway cries of children, the birdsong, the
whirr of insects gather force and come together in a paean of joy. His
heart swells. At last! he thinks. At last it has come, the moment of ecstatic
unity with the All! Fearful that the moment will slip away, he tries to put
a halt to the clatter of thought, tries simply to be a conduit for the great
universal force that has no name.
It lasts no more than seconds in clock time, this signal event. But
when he gets up and dusts off his jacket, he is refreshed, renewed. . . . If
he has not utterly been transfigured, then at least he has been blessed with
a hint that he belongs on this earth. (117: see also 154)
In the face of Disgrace’s pared-down style and strong skepticism about the
metaphysical, such visionary experiences — both those that break into
David’s consciousness and those that he, following Richard, consciously
sustains — yield our only access to a spiritual life beyond, or alongside, the
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74 ! BILL MCDONALD
quotidian. David claims to agree with his daughter that “there is no higher
life. This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals” (74). In its
conclusion the novel will take that “sharing with animals” and put it
together with another way of seeing, certainly “different” if not higher
(74), to bring David Lurie to a new beginning point for a future he could
not envision earlier.
David’s visionary life isn’t as prolific as Elizabeth Curren’s, but he has
a number of such experiences during the course of Disgrace. Some are
transitory, others — such as the vision of Lucy “struggling with the two in
the blue overalls, struggling against them. He writhes, trying to blank it
out” (97) — produce dark and painful knowledge.14 But three in particu-
lar, in the last quarter of the novel, prove especially illuminating for the
final turns in his character and the novel’s outcome.
Ironically, however, David’s understanding of “vision as eros” in the
early stages of his story leaves us a long way from Richard’s intricate reli-
gious hierarchies. Rather we’re back with David’s “womanizing”; Richard
may passionately allegorize women and marriage, but David, evoking his
unchangeable “temperament,” largely denigrates and controls them.15 His
language and his “vision” seem, in the beginning, almost a repudiation of
Richard’s beloved Song of Songs: self-protection is his goal, not openness,
or even alertness, toward the other. He is cool, bordering on cold. “He has
always been a man of the city, at home amid a flux of bodies where eros
stalks and glances flash like arrows” (6), and Cape Town, “prodigal of
beauty, of beauties” (12), has always given him what he wanted. We have
his quick, Pavlovian ranking of women’s body parts, his “contented”
account of carefully managed lovemaking with Soraya, his self-serving ide-
alization of Melanie Isaac’s young body, itself the latest of his many crushes
on “one or another of his charges” (12). His perception of Melanie —
indeed, of all his students — is habitual, canned: an “eye” that seems
beyond “education.” He claims that the “humility” he derives from his
diminished academic position makes him a deeper learner than his charges,
but his actions don’t bear that out.
In addition, we have his anti-erotic account of his brief fling with his
departmental secretary, Dawn (“Bucking and clawing, she works herself
into a froth of excitement that in the end only repels him” [9]). This last
encounter leads him to think of Origen and self-castration, and a particu-
larly chilling vision spins into his mind:
. . . a simple enough operation, surely; they do it to animals every
day. . . Severing, tying off: with local anesthetic and a steady hand and a
modicum of phlegm one might even do it oneself, out of a textbook. A
man on a chair snipping away at himself: an ugly sight, but no more ugly,
from a certain point of view, than the same man exercising himself on the
body of a woman. (9)
Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 75
This and several other sterile visions like it dominate the early sections
of David’s narrative. Directly beneath his account of the city’s erotic
glances lies his disgust with sexuality, women’s and his own alike, and his
acute sense that his life has become a “desert” (11) and himself a “ghost”
(7), a self-parody of his earlier Byronic days. All expressions of desire and
the erotic, not just the specifically sexual, are suddenly tainted for David,
falling directly into decay and death; his “anxious flurries of promiscuity”
(7) cannot cover his feelings of being newly undesirable and unlovable,
and his exploitive seduction of the child-like Melanie represents a futile,
narcissistic attempt to recover a power and beauty that has long since left
him behind. Self-parody indeed.
Though dominated by these cold, measured narratives, other more
hopeful features of David’s psyche still break through on occasion. His
frequent self-criticism, stinging and accurate, is part of this — though his
inability, or refusal, to act on what he knows about himself shows its ethi-
cal impotence. But there are further signs that give us a more complex
David early on, and lay the groundwork for his visionary experiences late
in the novel. He does, first, find Melanie authentically beautiful, and is
repeatedly astonished (19, 20, 25, 27) by the power of the feelings and
desire she generates in him. He can also, however briefly, rightly perceive
her suffering (for example, 27). Next comes a triangle of saints: Origen
and Benedict (9, and also 66), and St. Hubert (84), who famously gave
refuge to a deer. David, as his early book confirms, does know his way
around religious history.16 He does not mention Richard by name, but his
celebration of erotic vision, twisted now but still resonant, will return
strongly near the end as well. David can also see himself figured in the
world as another, for example in the janitor who watches Melanie’s play
rehearsal with him in the darkness of an empty theatre (24). But this
moment of insight — “the old men whose company he seems on the point
of joining” — transposes instead into a familiar vision of aversion: “tramps
and drifters with their stained raincoats and cracked false teeth and hairy
earholes” and then of narrow self-justification: “Can they be blamed for
clinging to the last to their place at the sweet banquet of the senses?” (24).
This passage in turn points toward David’s most serious and full account
of eros in the book’s first half: his parable of the male dog beaten for
expressing his instinct for nearby females in heat (90). David’s vision here
is of his willing service to Aphrodite and Blake (“Sooner murder an infant
in its cradle than nurse unsatisfied desire” [69]). A small sleight of hand
allows him to substitute Blake’s “desire” for the dog’s “instinct”: Desire is
self-justifying, beyond ethical judgment or control. His conviction about
his fixed “temperament” sustains him through the show trial that his ethi-
cally beleaguered institution imposes on him.17
As David defiantly endures his “inquiry” before his academic peers,
refusing “a priest” and “repentance” (49, 58), and then sets out for the
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76 ! BILL MCDONALD
near-monastic isolation of his daughter’s farm, he reenacts not so much the
stages of Richard’s taxonomy as the contemplative, ascetic spirit of his
undertaking. But it is above all in his visions, unbidden and willed, that
David achieves a measure of self-knowledge and aesthetic breakthrough
that culminate in loving ethical action: “vision as eros.” We see this process
work itself out in the three central visions of his life: the re-envisioning of
his opera; the fleeting images of all the women he has ever known; and in
the Wordsworthian, Victorine sustained “spot of time” which finally
shapes a new life for himself and his daughter. All point toward meaningful
futures that David had despaired of achieving, and to an ethic that resitu-
ates desire in full recognition of the other.
IV, i
Forgiveness but also unflinchingness: that is the mixture I have in
mind, if it is attainable. First the unflinchingness, then the forgive-
ness.
— J. M. Coetzee, “Interview” (“Beckett”), Doubling the
Point, 29
In Rousseau’s mind one had only to be very honest with oneself,
and brave . . . and one could tell the truth about oneself . . .
[Dostoevsky] says that it simply is not good enough to look in your
heart and write, that what comes out when you write is quite as
likely to be some self-serving lie as it is to be the ruthless truth about
yourself. I must say that, in this confrontation, my sympathy is
wholly with Dostoevsky. The basis of his position is simply that the
heart of our own desire is unknown to us and, perhaps even further,
that it’s in the nature of human desire not to know itself fully, to
have some kernel of the unknowable in it. That, perhaps, is what ani-
mates desire, namely that it is unknowable to itself.
— J. M. Coetzee, “A Conversation with Eleanor Wachtel,”
Brick 67 (2001), 45
Strange how, as desire relaxes its grip on her body, she sees more and
more clearly a universe ruled by desire. . . . Not the least thing, not
the last thing but is called to by love. A vision, an opening up, as the
heavens are opened up by a rainbow when the rain stops falling.
Does it suffice, for old folk, to have these visions now and again,
these rainbows, as a comfort, before the rain starts pelting down
again? Must one be too creaky to join the dance before one can see
the pattern?
— J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, Lesson 7
Disgrace’s narrator makes it quite clear that David Lurie’s opera, originally
titled Byron in Italy (6), corresponds in revealing ways to his character;
Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 77
indeed, David himself is more than half aware that its changing form mirrors
his changing spirit. Begun as an account of the older Byron’s last great affair,
with the young Countess Teresa Guiccioli, David planned to contrast her full,
youthful passion with the poet’s ennui. She would plead to be carried away
“to another life”; he too would long for another life, but one of retirement,
even the peace of death. This conception re-presents the split David experi-
ences between his own youthful ardor, now largely elegiac, and his increasing
despair over his loss of passion, desirability, and even the semblance of love.
Like one of Richard’s contemplative novices, he imaginatively identified with
Byron and made Teresa over into his own image. He did learn from this first
version — “At the age of thirty-five he [Byron] has begun to learn that life is
precious” (162) — but he can’t get words and music together.
But by the time he takes up the opera again, during his final visit to
Cape Town, those thematic lines — youth and age, passion and ennui —
no longer arrest him. After long contemplation he recasts his heroine as an
asthmatic, middle-aged “dumpy little widow” (181) resembling Bev Shaw
more than Melanie. He wonders if he can have the requisite empathy with
this “peasant” Teresa to sustain the work. He now finds her alone in the
Villa Gamba, hoarding Byron’s letters as her last hope for “immortality.”
In an echo of The Aspern Papers (and Dominick Argento’s 1988 opera
based on Henry James’s short novel) David concentrates on his heroine’s
feelings.18 Byron is now long dead, but not silenced; “from the caverns of
the underworld” he sings pale, desiccated lyrics: ‘‘It has dried up, the source
of everything.’’ His voice is so weak that Teresa must, Echo-like, repeat his
words, doing her best to call him back to life and passion, even as David
gives her voice in turn. But this is not a patriarchal conquest of her voice,
for this time David is not fully in control of his material, or even sure how
it will turn out. Instead she surprises him, and the act of composition
enters into the visionary. Formerly he had planned to “lift” melodies from
Gluck or another master, blurring the line between the intertextual and
plagiarism; now that sort of consciously controlled, well-managed art-
making simply doesn’t work. Rather he is “in the grip” of his revised
character, eating little, following as she leads him (186), writing down new
music. Sound-images for the work rise from beyond David’s own limited
musical palette (183). “Sometimes the contour of a phrase occurs to him
before he has a hint of what the words themselves will be; sometimes the
words call forth the cadence; sometimes the shade of a melody, having
hovered for days on the edge of hearing, unfolds and blessedly reveals
itself” (183). This “blessed revelation” arises from David’s attentive,
extended contemplation of his Teresa, and his channeling of her words and
music.19 Like his Teresa, David may “howl to the moon,” but also like her,
he begins to move beyond the narcissism and the paralyzing negativity that
prevented him receiving anything “from the heart.” She becomes his guide
to a new purpose, and a new self-understanding.
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78 ! BILL MCDONALD
And what does she reveal? That the elegiac and the youthful erotic are
no longer central to her life, and that she is willing to risk all the disgrace
and ridicule of becoming a comic figure: the seeker of “immortal longing”
in a frumpy, long-forgotten body. The instrument to elicit that comedy is
the old African township banjo that David turns to for her songs, a relic
from Lucy’s childhood. David will soon take the same risk, life following
art, playing the banjo to the delight only of a crippled dog and the
“whooping” amusement of three neighbor boys (212).20 The banjo relo-
cates David’s relationship to Teresa and Byron; he plunks away, separate
now from both and speaking for neither. Instead he discovers that he is
“held in the music itself,” every attempt to soar away reined back by the
“ludicrous instrument . . . like a fish on a line” (184–85). No identifica-
tion, no satire, but the wordless music itself “inventing him” (186), an
ecstatic, out-of-body experience — but one leashed to irony, comedy, the
modern. To learn aesthetic, visionary transport from the cracked kettle of
the banjo: Victorine allegory has obviously been inverted, but its goal
preserved. Some readers insist on the opera’s failure because David knows
he won’t complete it (214), but it has been a contemplative and moral
triumph, breaking David free of his granite temperament and self-regard.
Unlike his Teresa, he is not trapped in a watchful house. But even so, by
refusing to be dead, by singing her immortal longings (209), she carries
him past the “honour” that has blocked his change, and brought him
“back to this world” (212), a world in which he can act, in which, thanks
to his disgrace, he can do the right thing.
Richard’s Trinitarian vision as eros also lies beneath the almost inex-
haustible series of triangles that have organized David’s experience. Many
of these are what his ex-wife Rosalind resolutely calls “disgraceful and vul-
gar too” (45): to be in bed with Melanie and Soraya at once, or with
Melanie and her sister, or imagining Lucy and her recently departed lover
Helen from a vantage point in their bedroom. It’s true that, decades after
Freud, readers may no longer be shocked by half-conscious feelings of
desire between parents and children, or by male fantasies of multiple part-
ners. But the triangles don’t stop there. The opera began with triangula-
tion between Teresa, Byron, and Count Guiccioli. Lucy has her hate-filled
triangle of rapists. There’s Bill and Bev Shaw with David. Lucy, Petrus, and
David, and David, Lucy, and Pollux form other, increasingly problematic
threesomes. It’s hard to find scenes in the book that don’t depend on this
particular geometry.
Still, we are surprised, I think, by the late turns that David’s triangula-
tions take: Teresa, Byron, and David meeting in music; and the transfor-
mation that ends the novel: Bev, David, and “Driepoot,” the three-legged
“tripod” dog, a tableau with David standing between his two best teachers
in love and ethical action. In Richard’s terms, love can only fulfill itself if
there are three persons, separate yet unified. Just as Richard’s unusual
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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 79
theology made the Holy Spirit a full, acting Person in the Trinity,21 so
Coetzee makes Driepoot into a co-equal lover and beloved.
To be sure, this is no victorious, monologic allegory; human societies
that permit so many “excess dogs” that euthanizing becomes an ethical act
lie far from any City of God. Driepoot’s death, even as it calls up a strong
ethical vision, also calls to mind the vicious deaths of Lucy’s dogs at human
hands.22 Only the old, unwanted, and angry bulldog Katy, David’s female
counterpart, survives. Yet David’s ethical action grows out of the over-
whelming feelings produced in him by the “theatre” of the dogs’ impo-
tence and suffering, and he sees himself as a harijan, the lowest of the low,
doing ritualized work (146) whose deep ethical significance only Bev Shaw
sees. So harijan, “disgraced” and untouchable dogs, in this “horizontal”
allegory may become spiritual guides to authentic love, and frumpy animal
activists may prove wiser than all, teaching self-sacrifice (“One gets used to
things getting harder . . .” [219]) and responsibility. This is the erotic
vision to which his disgrace has brought him: not to wallow in what he has
lost, or in his own righteousness before his judges, or in his guilt before
Melanie and her family, or even his self-regarding ideas of happiness, but
to strip his old self away until only his “immortal longing” and a single act
of selfless love shine through, transcending for a time what he had been.
Giving up Driepoot, “bending to the tempest” (209), refusing the tempta-
tions of possession and control, and accepting his new future as a grandfa-
ther in rural South Africa are all related. The dog’s love lives on in him as,
perhaps, his love will live on in Lucy’s child and in the country: desire
without possession, desire that refuses possession, vision — and ethics —
as eros. Teresa, tied to the Villa Gamba, has no way to take this final step.
So David asks her “forgiveness” (214) because he cannot save her in the
same way that she saved him. Immediately the novel takes us to the dogs’
holding pens and the “generous . . . unconditional” love of an animal.
Richard’s claims that transcendence follows alienation of the spirit, and
that “a virtue is nothing other than an ordered and moderated affection”
(13) have been resituated, and affirmed (Benjamin Major, V, 2, and III,
23).23
IV, ii
Morals have bedded with story-telling since the magic of the imagi-
native capacity developed in the human brain.
— Nadine Gordimer
We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of
which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of
those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.
— Edith Wharton, The Touchstone
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80 ! BILL MCDONALD
The composition of the opera gives us the first of David’s three decisive
visions that round out Disgrace. The second — actually a small set of con-
nected visions — comes shortly after he returns to the Dock Theatre to
see Melanie Isaacs’s ongoing performance in Sunset at the Globe Salon
(190–94). Unlike all his other affairs, he still senses “something unfin-
ished” about his relationship with Melanie, a “stored smell,” while at the
same time labeling any attempt to revive their affair as “crazy.” This cor-
responds to the earliest stages of contemplation in Richard’s hierarchy —
the sensuous, imaginative perception of an object in the world: a
beginning, but only that. He still sees Melanie selfishly as his last chance
for youthful passion, for that “flash of feeling,” but reluctantly affirms (in
a witty alteration of mythic male leads) “The marriage of Cronos and
Harmony: unnatural” (190).24 This predictably launches another of his
slightly bitter, self-regarding laments on old age, complete with phrases
from Yeats and an audible sigh. But he knows that Melanie is back on
stage, and he goes.
In an unusually straightforward piece of allegory, the Dock itself had
been until recently a cold-storage holding bin for cattle carcasses headed
for export, now revised into a “fashionable entertainment spot.” Just so,
Sunset has been revived in a newer, spiffier production, but remains a post-
apartheid, “nakedly political,” slapstick comedy with a multicultural cast.
David still dislikes the play, whose too-easy achievement of cultural cathar-
sis (23) Coetzee places his book against. But Melanie has found her voice
in her reprised role as the novice hairdresser, and plays the part with an
assurance and “deft timing” that she lacked before, either in performance
or life. David speculates that perhaps Melanie has come through a trial of
her own and been made stronger. Like his imagined Teresa, she has found
a new self in an absurd part, asserted her independent voice in spite of the
bad jokes and “vulgar” puns. Instead of a banjo or mandolin she wields a
broom.
David, again in thrall to her youth and beauty, wishes for a “sign,” and
composes one: her clothes burning off in a “cold private flame” (echoing
the flame he endured during Lucy’s rape) and her standing “in a revelation
secret to him alone,” naked and perfect before him as she had in his
daughter’s room. It’s a summary of his controlling desire to date, and a
medieval vision out of Richard, charged with eros and idealization, repeat-
ing the enmeshing triangle of desire and incest, young lover and young
daughter, both unavoidable and crippling. But David’s eye has been edu-
cated by his reflections, and he moves past this appropriating vision of
Melanie to see her not as an idealized young body but more as a blossom-
ing actress (191) and independent daughter whose excellent performance
he wishes to take pride in.25 The transformation immediately yields two
involuntary visions. A memory — perhaps the true sign he hoped for (191)
— rises “without warning” of a young German tourist he had picked up
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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 81
years ago. He remembers her legs and soft hair, not in conquering, Byronic
tones but with a warmth that leads to a second, deeper vision:
In a sudden and soundless eruption, as if he had fallen into a waking
dream, a stream of images pours down, images of women he has known
on two continents, some from so far away in time that he barely recog-
nizes them. Like leaves blown on the wind, pell-mell, they pass before
him. A fair field full of folk: hundred of lives all tangled in his. He holds
his breath, willing the vision to continue.” (192)
Set against the opening catalog of “David’s women” (“wives and mis-
tresses” [7]), this set of streaming images from his deep time and space
flows by quickly, yet each person is recognized. And the cumulative effect
of all those faces is not more burnt-out exhaustion, more self-pitying
retreat, but instead curiosity about their histories: an empathetic rather
than narcissistic upwelling. Can the German girl be imagining him even as
he imagines her? This experience does not offer unambiguous closure, but
points the way to an erotic vision that draws on David’s disgrace, comes
out of that disgrace, and offers a sign. It turns on a word: enriched. David
had “stupidly” used it to describe his relationship to Melanie to reporters
during his trial (56), but now he’s ready to “stand by it” as the right word
for all his relationships with women: “. . . by each of them he was enriched,
and by the others too, even the least of them, even the failures. Like a
flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness” (192).
The enrichment came from each woman to him, and he has carried it with
him without knowing how to see it, until this moment. This comes close,
I think, to Richard’s claims for contemplation: its “enlargement (mentis
dilatation) and lifting up (mentis sublevatio) of the spirit’s vision,” leading
to its “adhering with wonder to the object that brings it joy.”26 The vision
ends with questions: where do these “hypnagogic” moments come from;
“what god is doing the leading?” Eros indeed: like Melanie in her play,
David’s “second act” of re-envisioning his chilling summary of the women
in his life has been empowered by love.
David’s overt literary associations with this vision are medieval, but
with Piers Plowman, not Richard of St. Victor. Langland’s dream-vision of
“a fair field of folk” is slightly recast; the lives of these women folk are not
occasions for satire, as are the men that pass before Piers in the poem, but,
in a striking metaphoric sequence, their faces “pour down” on him, then
ride the wind past him, before “tangling” (quite unlike scattered leaves)
their lives (not just their images) with his.27 In Richard’s terms, David here
sees more deeply into the “innermost part of things” because the “fog of
error” and “cloud of sin” have been lifted from experience (Major IV, 4).
That’s not David’s language, of course, but the description fits well; he
does not stand apart to judge the fair field, but to embrace it. At the same
time the “wives and mistresses” of David’s early, callous catalog have
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82 ! BILL MCDONALD
become not some perfect, idealized, grace-filled vision of women — even
in moments of visionary insight David will never entirely escape modernity
or conventional maleness or South Africa — but the dream-memory of
each woman has let him reclaim a word of great value: “enriched.”
Then the vision is over, and Coetzee, like Joyce but in much more
aggressive fashion, shows the limited impact of this epiphany on David’s
action. As a culmination of what he calls, without irony, his “night of rev-
elations” (194) David eyes a leather-clad prostitute, a drugged girl even
younger than Melanie, and has her service him on a dark cul-de-sac in his
car. “Why not?” he asks himself, and experiences a post-orgasm “content-
edness” just as he did with Melanie (19) and Soraya (5). This lacks the
“anxious flurry” of his earlier promiscuity, and adds the “strangely protec-
tive” feeling he has toward the girl, but the whole encounter carries us
back to his narcissism: Habitual old sex in the city. “So this is all it takes! he
thinks. How could I ever have forgotten it? (194): Honest, true to character,
but not a return to earlier “values” that anyone can admire, and hardly
“enriching.” The move from young love to protected daughter dissolves
in David’s familiar, destructive lusts. Sexual desire works in the present and
imagines an immediate future; David knows this, and repeats a judgment
he’s expressed to the Isaacs, and to Rosalind: “Not a bad man but not
good either” (195). He takes the benumbed girl back to her street corner,
which may be more than he did for Melanie, but not much more. Plainly,
even violently, Coetzee refuses any idealization of David’s vision; by itself
it is not enough. But it may clear the ground for a more important new
beginning with his flesh-and-blood daughter, Lucy.
IV, iii
Richard of St. Victor on the aftermath of an ecstatic vision: “For
truly, we are led outside ourselves in two ways: At one time we are
outside ourselves, but we descend below ourselves; at another time
we are outside ourselves, but we are raised above ourselves. . . . But
just as there is a two-fold going out, so there is also a two-fold
return. From both goings out we return as it were to the dwelling
place of our usual life, when after worldly labors or, preferably, after
a manifestation of celestial contemplations, we bring the eyes of our
mind back to the consideration of our morals, and through investi-
gation of our innermost being we examine by studious reconsidera-
tion what sort of person we are ourselves. . .
When Peter returned to himself he said: “Now I know truly
that the Lord sent his angel.” [Acts 12:11]
— Benjamin Major, V: 8
Against the endlessness of skepticism Dostoevsky poses the closure
not of confession but of absolution and therefore of the intervention
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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 83
of grace in the world. In that sense Dostoevsky is not a psychological
novelist at all: he is finally not interested in the psyche, which he sees
as an arena of game-playing, of the middle of a novel. To the extent
that I am taken as a political novelist, it may be because I take it as
given that people must be treated as fully responsible beings.
Psychology is no excuse. Politics, in its wise stupidity, is at one with
religion here: one man, one soul, no half measures. What saves me
from a mere stupid stupidity, I would hope, is a measure of charity,
which is, I suppose, the way grace allegorizes itself in the world.
Another way of saying this is that I try not to lose sight of the reality
that we are children, unreconstructed (Freud wouldn’t disagree at
this point), to be treated with the charity that children have due to
them (charity doesn’t preclude clear-sightedness).
— J. M. Coetzee, “Interview” (“Autobiography and
Confession”), Doubling the Point, 249
David’s final vision emerges out of his fifteenth and final exchange with
Lucy, during which he begins to accept her choice to keep her baby. Lucy
deliberately wills her future; she will, following nature, come to love her
child, and shall choose to be “a good mother and a good person.” David
responds yet again with “it’s too late for me” sourness, but a seed has been
planted: “A good person. Not a bad resolution to make, in dark times”
(216). Love and the ethical now interweave for Lucy, and David will strug-
gle to achieve the same.
Returning uninvited to the farm a few days later, David leaves his truck
at the last hillcrest and walks the remaining distance. The scene echoes his
first view of his daughter months earlier, when he first arrived in the
Eastern Cape (“From the shade of the stoep Lucy emerges into the sun-
light. For a moment he does not recognize her” [59]). This time he gains
an overview of the novel’s central landscape in its “season of blooming,”
its “bees . . . in seventh heaven,” before walking down the hill toward his
daughter, engrossed in her gardening “among the flowers” (216–17). The
ducks and geese are on the pond, “visitors from afar,” but no other people
are in sight. He halts at the border fence, honoring Lucy’s independence,
and watches her work alongside her “snoozing” watchdog, Katy. His
imagination and reason work together to produce a remarkable four-part
instance of Richard’s second level of contemplation. The scene’s mood
matches his imagined music for the young Teresa: “lushly autumnal yet
edged with irony . . .” (181).
David’s eye goes first to “the milky, blue-veined skin and broad, vul-
nerable tendons of the backs of her knees, the least beautiful part of a
woman’s body, the least expressive, and therefore perhaps the most
endearing” (217). Unsurprisingly, his vision begins at an unattractive low
point; his curdled imagination isolates the “least beautiful” body part, as
it often has when David sought to protect his isolation and superiority.
Even the fact that he finds it “endearing” is ambiguous, since this could
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84 ! BILL MCDONALD
mark his characteristic condescension toward women as easily as a fresh
turn toward grace and the future. Ditto the beginning of Lucy’s transfor-
mation into a peasant that follows, a transformation repeating that of the
imagined contadina Teresa (181) as she moved “beyond honor” to the
disgrace that ultimately enabled her assertion of free selfhood. In Teresa’s
aria David listens to the voice of an authentic other, and the hidden,
declining Byron completes the triangle; in this portrait Lucy and her hid-
den, waxing child are honored in their separate integrity in David’s
vision.
For all of the novel’s controlled, clean prose, the scene follows the
path of Teresa’s monologue arias in yet another way, operatically soaring
past loss and degradation to discovery. Here the “peasant” comparison
sparks the idea of the “immemorial” that will expand as the vision unfolds.
David then imagines, lyrically, Lucy’s entire existence, from “tadpole” to
the “solid” woman now before him that carries a future: a child who will
continue a “line of existences.” David knows that his “share” in the line
will “inexorably” be forgotten, yet in another rising turn he sees himself “a
grandfather. A Joseph. Who would have thought it!” (217). Like the
Virgin’s husband, David hopes to be a useful bystander in the birth of a
new generation.28
Continuing the up-and-down rhythm of his vision, David then thinks,
conventionally, of his inability to lure a pretty girl to his bed once more,
but, as with his early reservations, this tired line of thought gives way to
affirmation. Instead of imagining a blood grandchild, he imagines adopt-
ing and accepting Lucy’s child, fathered in hatred and violence. As we have
seen, Lucy’s single description of her rapists concentrated on their look of
utter hostility: she anticipated what the sexual assault would be like, but
not the vision-as-hatred that came with it. So the weight of the passage falls
instead on David placing himself in a new line of descent, one arising from
a violent act that he abhors but which nonetheless creates a future (“What
will it entail, being a grandfather?”).
Ever the literary man, David muses on instructing himself in grandfa-
thering by rereading Hugo, even as he had mused on being the “shadow-
father” to Soraya’s children (6). He tallies up the reasons for his predicted
“below average” success; he lacks “the virtues of the old: equanimity,
kindliness, patience” (217). Yet this vision, and the book’s last scene, both
show him to be practicing just these virtues: a wish fulfilled? Then he
offers a strange idea: that the “virtue of passion” might fade as these more
equitable virtues rise in him. It suddenly makes us re-see David’s first
“vision of eros”: passion — its natural rightness in the face of the preju-
diced judicial committee, its integrity as represented in the vision of Blake
(69) and the fable of the male dog whipped for desire (90).29 But now
“passion” can no longer stand as a separate, self-justifying virtue, but must
be integrated with love and forbearance and respect for the irreducible
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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 85
otherness of its object. It must be refigured in a wider notion of the
“vision of eros,” one that embraces all desire from the sexual to the self-
lessly loving.30 The roots of his vision run right through the book, in every
scene.
Then “the wind drops” and his vision climaxes in
a moment of utter stillness which he would wish prolonged for ever: the
gentle sun, the stillness of mid-afternoon, bees busy in a field of flowers,
and at the centre of the picture a young woman, das ewig Weibliche,
lightly pregnant, in a straw sunhat. A scene ready-made for a Sargent or
a Bonnard. City boys like him; but even city boys can recognize beauty
when they see it, can have their breath taken away. (218)
The setting is Wordsworthian, but the main weight falls on the pictorial as
great painters might envision, and on David’s involuntary associations
with Faust and Richard of St. Victor, his aesthetic and visionary frames.
Lucy metamorphoses from a thick-kneed unattractive woman to an arche-
typal peasant to Goethe’s last, overriding archetype of the “eternal femi-
nine,” an oxymoronically “lightly pregnant” young woman that saves
Faust from narcissistic passion and hatred and carries him to a higher
world. Her “broad, vulnerable tendons” have become beautiful, trans-
formed by contemplation into a vision worthy of two worldly painters
(though not an imitation of them). The narration balances David’s aes-
thetic self-consciousness and postmodern skepticism with his genuine
rapture. Like the two veteran painters he too may be a sophisticated “city
boy,” but the vision literally took his breath away, translated him for a
moment from our “breathing world” to the spiritual kingdom of Byron’s
fallen angel (32), or of Boito’s Mefistofele, defeated by the ewig Weibliche
and rose-scattering cherubim — and then decisively returned him to time,
self-consciousness, and Lucy. The subjunctive verb “would wish” positions
him perfectly; were it not for the finally more valuable quotidian reality of
the scene, he might well wish for the vision’s “timeless beauty” to never
end.
David ends his meditation with a brief inquiry in which he tries to
unite the good and the beautiful. He reviews the history of his own gazing
— only “pretty girls” — and the paucity of that history leads to the pivotal
ethical and aesthetic question: “Is it too late to educate the eye?” to see as
I just have, and then to act on that vision? David begins an answer by call-
ing out again to his daughter, who, in a final addition to the ewig Weibliche
portrait, “looks the picture of health.” After a dozen earlier accounts of
her aging, unattractive body, the change is remarkable. Her formal but
friendly offer of tea marks a new beginning of their relationship:
“Visitorship, visitation: a new footing, a new start” (218). “Visitation”
places us first in the realm of parents and children meeting on new footing
after separation and divorce; then in religion, when the Virgin visited
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86 ! BILL MCDONALD
Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist (the second “joyful mystery” of
the rosary). Elizabeth (or Mary) sang “The Song of Hannah,” a poem-
prayer (1 Samuel 2:1–10) giving thanks to Yahweh for the birth of her son,
Samuel: A word, a contemplation, and an action worthy of Richard of St.
Victor.31
Put thematically, grace may be present near this narrative’s end, but
disgrace does not vanish; David’s self-pronounced sentence of “disgrace
without term” (172) remains in force. Pessimistic? — perhaps, if by pes-
simism we mean a distrust of all fables of steady, upward human progress
and any easy, settled connection between self-knowledge and action in the
world.32 Optimistic? — perhaps, if by optimism we mean that human
change for the better is possible, if fitful; and that one’s habitual actions
can be altered, though rarely obliterated; that love in any form can proffer
meaning. Richard of St. Victor’s account of the “unknowing” that carries
the visionary past rational knowledge, and then of the memory of that
“unknowing,” attains a Proustian subtlety that illuminates David’s
encounter:
And although we may retain in memory something from that experience
and see it through a veil, as it were, and as though in the middle of a
cloud, we lack the ability to comprehend or call to mind either the man-
ner of seeing or the quality of the vision. And marvelously, in a way
remembering, we do not remember; and not remembering, we remem-
ber . . . (Benjamin Major, IV, 23)
V
Don’t you become like someone called in from the street, a beggar,
for instance, offered fifty kopeks to dispose of an old blind dog, who
takes the rope and ties the noose and strokes the dog to calm it . . .
and as he does so feels a current of feeling begin to flow, so that
from that instant onward he and the dog are no longer strangers,
and what should have been a mere job of work has turned into the
blackest betrayal . . .?
— J. M. Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg, 99
It’s as accurate a measure as any of a society: what is the smallest act
of kindness that is considered heroic?
— Anne Michaels. Fugitive Pieces, 162
Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentum mortalia tangunt.
— Aeneid I, 461–62 and Disgrace, 162
As we approach the novel’s final scene, and the hard questions about
desire, ethics, and literary form that it raises, I want to round out this
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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 87
account of the visionary in Disgrace with one final way of reading its
dynamics. I apologize for introducing yet another angle of vision at the
eleventh hour, but I think that Charles Altieri gives us an important, spe-
cifically literary way to understand the ethical connection between lyric
vision and David’s actions with the dogs, between the visionary and ethical
praxis:
Literary modes like lyric often ask us to participate in states that are either
too elemental or too transcendental or too absolute or too satisfyingly
self-absorbed to engage ethical criticism. Yet these states can have enor-
mous impact on how and why we are concerned with values of all kinds
. . . at their richest these works explore the limitations of all judgmental
stances by requiring complex blends of sympathy and distance, and hence
eliciting our fascination with extreme states of mind while complicating
any possible grasp of how one might put such states into the categories of
commensurability upon which ethical judgments may ultimately depend.33
While analyses of ethics in narrative almost always turn on questions of
agency — a character’s, an author’s, a reader’s — Altieri develops the idea
that the lyrical experience can shape those states that typically come before
any of our specific actions. So, at first, David’s vision of a meaningful
future as accepting father and loving grandparent — familial, life-celebrat-
ing, desirable — may seem to stand in sharp contrast to his future-erasing
decision to euthanize Driepoot this week rather than next. Altieri’s
account, however, lets us see them as of a piece; David’s visionary experi-
ences prepare him, in Bev Shaw’s “condilectio” company, to see Driepoot
clearly as a doomed animal with a pain-filled life, not as his private pet or
sentimental companion. Visionary love is not blind; it integrates and
clarifies, and like great lyric prepares the way for action. David can at last
separate his desire from the need to control the desired; making the dog
an exception would be in the service of his old narcissism, not his love.
He now desires not to desire in the old, narrow ways. This enables him to
act on what he knows, even — especially — if that action is not self-
gratifying. His love is what Richard of St. Victor called “violent”: abso-
lute, and ruthless, in a spiritual stage beyond the immediate “blackest
betrayal” sensed by The Master of Petersburg’s beggar in my epigraph.
Disgrace shows us how lyrical envisioning provides a space in the spirit
from which ethical choices can emerge without diminishing their painful
complexity.
Finally, there’s the significance of Disgrace’s organization, the formal
side of what Coetzee termed “grace allegorizing itself in our world.” Its
twenty-four chapters match the twenty-four dogs that Bev and David put
down on the book’s final day, with the limping, “incomplete” Driepoot
matching the three-legged final chapter, seemingly incomplete in action
and in meaning. It’s a formal gesture that confirms the novel’s uncompro-
Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700.
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88 ! BILL MCDONALD
mising, austere conclusion. For some it’s a disgraceful ending, leaving
readers morally uncertain and aesthetically dissatisfied, just as its account
of South Africa’s still-divided and violent culture has angered other citizens
anxious for brighter visions of their country’s future. But a careful reading
complicates these claims for frustrating incompleteness or defeatist cultural
analysis. It’s easy to imagine that David’s future, “unreconstructed” life in
the harsh new South Africa will include further backsliding as well as fur-
ther harijan service; Richard’s “virtuous shame” of disgrace remains, but
it has enabled David’s vision of a new family and loving loyalty to the
unwanted dogs. His knowing visions align with Altieri’s account of lyric’s
rich dynamic: greater sympathy and greater distance together. In Age of
Iron Elizabeth Curren, seeking to aid the homeless Mr. Vercueil and the
young black rebel John, describes herself as “full enough to give and to
give from one’s fullness,” and claims that “One must love what is nearest.
One must love what is to hand, as a dog loves” (7, 190). By stripping
himself of distorted stories of desire, and by his openness to visions of
animal love, “immortal longing,” and his daughter’s independent future,
David arrives at a similar place. His final words, “I am giving him up,” are
poised in the present between intention and completion.34 This abrupt
finish, its “limping” incompleteness echoing David’s opera, at the same
time preserves openness to the future. We have concluded our journey
through disgrace’s many permutations, but David’s future, like South
Africa’s, remains in suspension.
Coetzee’s consistent reliance on the visionary throughout his fictions
is part of his strong resistance to reductive materialism, and to any single-
level, monologic accounts of subjectivity and ethics, politics and history.
More particularly, in Disgrace, he probes the complex relationships
between desire, vision, and the ethical. Desire is often at odds with the
latter two, as in David’s city-bred gazing or in his exploitation of Melanie.
Unreflective gazing can make desire a self-justifying anchor of action,
while the ethical may seem to refuse desire altogether. But Disgrace
doesn’t rest in a puritanical account of this subject; controlled or sup-
pressed desire doesn’t by itself lead to the good life. Instead it explores
how the visionary and the ethical require desire’s energy and drive toward
an imagined future to meet their aims: vision as eros, understood in the
widest terms. By showing this Coetzee makes a place for the visionary
within his chastened, clear-sighted humanism. It gives him an allegorical
route for preserving the discoveries of a medieval mystic and three
Romantic poets in his writing without reviving them forcibly, or accepting
them in an uncritical way. It also lets him explore “horizontally” the sym-
metries between artistic and religious vision, and to connect both to ethical
action, to seeing things anew. It is still not too late to “take our breath
away” (218), and to do so without taking away our skepticism, our convic-
tions, or our educated eye.
Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700.
Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:04:00.
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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 89
Notes
1 “Interview” (on Kafka’s “The Burrow”) in Doubling the Point, 203.
2 “Interview” (on “The Poetics of Reciprocity”) in Doubling the Point, 57. It’s also
worth mentioning that Coetzee, a Protestant by heritage, received his secondary
education at a Marist high school in Cape Town.
3 There is the tantalizing case of Richard’s first Abbot, one Ernisius, who was
accused of “misconduct” and eventually dismissed from the Augustinian monas-
tery of St. Victor by a papal commission. The misconduct was apparently more
administrative than erotic, but Ernisius’s “disgrace” resonates teasingly for readers
of David’s story. The charges against him included “appointing his favorites to
office and acting in prejudicial ways” (Zinn, “Introduction,” 4), perhaps the
monastic equivalents of David’s institutional offenses. (Richard himself is credited
with a work with another provocative title: Liber Penitentialis I.)
4 By choosing these titles Richard places himself directly in line with his famous
predecessor: Hugh of St. Victor’s On the Moral Ark of Noah and On the Mystical
Ark of Noah also trace the stages of the contemplative life.
5 Matt. 11:29: quoted by Richard in Benjamin Minor, chapter 46.
6 That shame counts as a virtue in Richard’s scheme does not mean that it func-
tions only in the righteous: “Even perverse men have shame, but if only it were
good, if only it were ordered! For if they had good shame [what Dinah represents],
perhaps they would not be perverse” (Benjamin Minor, 46).
7 He treats disgrace as a subset of shame (Benjamin Minor, 67).
8 South African writer Zakes Mda’s novel The Madonna of Excelsior (2004) offers
an intriguing parallel. Niki, the lead character, was raped and impregnated by an
Afrikaner farmer thirty years earlier (the well-known “Immorality Act” trial of
1971). In the novel’s present she accepts a ride from her attacker, and they discuss,
without resolution, the possibilities of forgiveness.
9 “Interview” (on “The Poetics of Reciprocity”) in Doubling the Point, 63.
10 David’s theory of poetry, which he crassly uses to seduce Melanie Isaacs, rests
on the equation between the poem’s “flash of revelation” and the listener’s “flash
of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love” (13). But in practice his own
language-focused interpretation of poetry concentrates on craft, not revelation.
11 The recent book Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits
of Discipline, edited by Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller, places this tradition
in theology in a fresh context.
12 De Trinitate, III, xix, in Zinn, 392. As C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love attests,
“love” was a hot topic throughout the twelfth century.
13 Postmodernism, 167–68. I’m equally indebted to Dominic Head’s excellent
discussion of postmodern allegory in his J. M. Coetzee. See also Bill Brown’s
remarkable PMLA essay on the religious and the medieval in Jameson himself:
“The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory).”
14 Here, and in several other scenes, the reader remembers that St. Lucy is the
patron saint of the blind.
Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700.
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90 ! BILL MCDONALD
15 This is a familiar Coetzee theme: the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians
enjoyed the “easy morals of the oases” of Empire, “the long-scented summer eve-
nings, the complaisant sloe-eyed women. Later that promiscuity modulated into
more discreet relations with housekeepers and girls lodged sometimes upstairs in
my rooms but more often downstairs with the kitchen help . . .” But the outcome
was the same: “Desire seemed to bring with it a pathos of distance and separation
which it was futile to deny” (45).
16 David cites the Church Fathers’ view of animals’ souls (78), for example, in
addition to these saints. St. Hubert’s story, which David doesn’t quite have
right, gives us another womanizer brought to his full character by a remarkable
vision. The gay blade Hubert (656–727), the eldest son of Bertrand, Duke of
Aquitaine, and grandson of Charibert, King of Toulouse, married Floribanne,
daughter of Dagobert, Count of Louvain, and seemed to have given himself
entirely up to the pomp and vanities of this world. But a great spiritual revolu-
tion was imminent. “On Good Friday morn, when the faithful were crowding
the churches, Hubert sallied forth to the chase. As he was pursuing a magnifi-
cent stag, the animal turned and, as the pious legend narrates, he was astounded
at perceiving a crucifix between its antlers, while he heard a voice saying:
‘Hubert, unless thou turnest to the Lord, and leadest an holy life, thou shalt
quickly go down into hell.’ Hubert dismounted, prostrated himself and said,
‘Lord, what wouldst Thou have me do?’ He received the answer, ‘Go and seek
Lambert, and he will instruct you” (C. F. W. Brown, The Catholic Encyclopedia).
St. Hubert, of course, is a patron saint of hunters, but also animal lovers and
caregivers; he cured dogs of hydrophobia.
17 Several readers have commented on the similarities between David’s trial and
the hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. See, for
example, Rosemary Jolly, “Going to the Dogs: Humanity in J. M. Coetzee’s
Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation
Commission” in Poyner, 148–71.
18 There are several other possible operatic sources for David’s composition. For
example, Virgil Thompson wrote a three-act opera on Byron. It has a simple
melodic style, and uses pastiche and popular tunes, such as “Auld Lang Syne” and
“Ach du lieber Augustine”: banjo-friendly practices that David/Coetzee may have
borrowed. Thompson’s Teresa is a character, but Byron commands the stage
throughout. Then there’s the libretto “Lord Byron’s Love Letter” (1955) by
Tennessee Williams, set by composer Raffaello de Banfield. It features an old
woman and her granddaughter who have one love letter of Byron’s that they show
only to paying customers. Its music is also a pastiche: Puccini, Strauss, and Menotti.
New York Times reviewer Tim Page, after a performance at the 1986 Spoleto festi-
val, remarked that Williams and de Banfield deserved equal credit for the work’s
obscurity.
19 This strongly resembles Coetzee’s description of his own artistic process:
“Writing is not free expression. There is a true sense in which writing is dialogic: a
matter of awakening the countervoices in oneself and embarking upon speech with
Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700.
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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 91
them. It is some measure of a writer’s seriousness whether he does evoke/invoke
these countervoices in himself, that is, step down from the position of what Lacan
calls ‘the subject supposed to know’” (“The Poetics of Reciprocity” in Doubling
the Point, 65).
20 Is this a suggestive symmetry with the three rapists, giving another, deliberately
vague glimpse into the future of South Africa?
21 Gervais Dumeige, Richard de Saint-Victor et l’idée chrétienne de l’amour, 90,
31.
22 For admirers of Barry Lopez it also brings to mind his 1989 Apologia, a medita-
tion on the many “road kill” animals he has removed from American highways and
honored as best he could.
23 Timothy Frances Strode’s stimulating account of space and the ethical makes
much the same point: “I will be much more interested in ‘exteriority,’ a term
related implicitly to the idea of exile, to an orientation outward . . . toward a
beyond that is ethically, domestically, and geographically opposed to, or better yet,
other to propriety and possession. . . . In ethical terms, my focus will turn toward
the idea of hospitality, an ethical orientation that could be said to begin to manifest
itself to the degree that propriety — the moral form that best characterizes the
ethical orientation of territoriality — absents itself” (178).
24 Cadmus was a young rescuer of Zeus, while Harmony was the daughter of
Aphrodite and sister of Eros; their wedding marked the last time, in myth, that all
the Olympian gods and living men sat at the same banquet table and toasted one
another. In old age their deep eros turned Cadmus and Harmony into intertwined
snakes, an image that recalls David’s totem animal (Calasso, 381ff.).
25 Lucy Valerie Graham (2003, 438) reads this paternal feeling as a further instance
of David’s patriarchal claim on Melanie as “his property,” and links his emotions
solely to the satisfactions of power, not as genuine, if transferred, fatherly pride. By
extension, this would level out David’s vision and his subsequent pick-up of the
prostitute, lumping them together as yet more examples of his claims of privilege
and control. It denies, or rather reduces, any potentially praiseworthy feeling in
David’s psyche to an expression of dominance, sublimated or direct. Graham’s
David, like Farodia Rasool’s David in the university “inquiry” scene, must remain
representative, and can be made acceptable only in accordance with a certain script.
His claim that with Melanie he experienced “something generous that was doing
its best to flower” (89) cannot be accepted at face value.
26 Major I, 3 and V, 2. Consider also this lovely passage from Major II, 5, which
could pass as a description of David’s character at this moment, and arguably of the
novel as a whole: “We are easily able to grasp a working of nature. As in grasses, in
trees and in animals: in grasses, how they grow and mature; in trees, how they leaf
out blossom and bear fruit; in animals, how they conceive and give birth, how
some grow and others die. . . . An artificial work is considered a work of human
activity, as in engraving, in painting, in writing, in agriculture and in other artificial
works, in all of which we find many things for which we ought worthily to venerate
and marvel at the dignity of a divine gift. And so, because they cooperate mutually
Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700.
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92 ! BILL MCDONALD
with each other, natural work and artificial work are joined to each other on the
sides, as it were from the side, and are united together in themselves by mutual
contemplation.”
27 The leaves recall Iliad VI, and Glaucon’s oft-quoted parable of the generations
passing as leaves, but more pertinently the rose petals of love that the chorus of
women (cherubim in Boito) cast down on the great negator Mephistopheles in
Faust, driving him away with eros.
28 Richard’s typology in Benjamin Minor, chapter 70, gives us an allegorical
Joseph embodying the “discretion” and “complete self-knowledge,” the “care and
keeping of all his brothers,” and “the foresight of future things.” Joseph knows
“the vices of the heart and the infirmities of the body,” knowledge hard-won by
David as well.
29 Elizabeth Curren extends this figure in a remarkable way in Age of Iron,
Coetzee’s novel preceding Disgrace and its spiritual twin: “This letter has become
a maze, and I a dog in the maze, scurrying up and down the branches and tunnels,
scratching and whining at the same old places, tiring, tired. Why do I not call for
help, call to God? Because God cannot help me. God is looking for me but he
cannot reach me. God is another dog in the maze. I smell God and God smells me.
I am the bitch in her time, God the male. God smells me, he can think of nothing
else but finding me and taking me” (137–38).
30 Here is Faust himself, in the epilogue of Boito’s Mefistofele: “Ogni mortal”:
Every mortal / mystery I have savored, / The real, the Ideal, / the love of a
maiden, / the love of a goddess. . . . Yes. / But Reality brought suffering / and
the Ideal was a dream. / Having reached the last step / of extreme old age, / my
soul now delights / in a final dream: / king of a tranquil world, / of a boundless
expanse, / I want to give life / to a fruitful people.” Translation supervised by
Gwyn Morris.
31 See also Rita Barnard. “Coetzee’s Country Ways,” 390.
32 See Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit.
33 Charles Altieri. “Lyrical Ethics and Literary Experience.”
34 See Mark Sanders, “Disgrace,” 363–73, esp. 368.
Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700.
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