On first reading Disgrace.

December 2000
What follows is a repeat of my december 2000 blog on a former now defunct websiteHello destiny.

“JM Coetzee has sold out to the literary establishment.” That was my first reaction on reading Disgrace some years ago.

Along with many others of his admirers I felt, perhaps unfairly, that his shift from post- structuralist to modern poetic realist was possibly more motivated by the need for a pension than the demands of his craft.

I had not read Disgrace, when it first came out for the same reason that I don’t read Harry Potter, because I was wrapping up some work of my own. However late in 2000, some of my colleagues from the English department, at the school where I teach part-time in the business department, asked me if I would please read Coetzee’s new novel, and help them out with some thoughts, perhaps, for teaching the book to the Matrics [School leaving class] the following year. The book had, as you know simply ‘leapt’ into prominence, and there was, it seemed, a shortage of reviews, ‘n things said about it.

I was at that time engaged in a personal goal quest, I called the “Millennium Gap”©, to give me space between one book and the next. So I was recording my own history of that memorable year, by writing some piece of poetic construction each day through the year 2000: often in response to the events of the day, sometimes other things. In December, after the year had ended, Disgrace became part of my daily fodder in a voracious drive to feed that anxious need. It produced two pieces of work (of the 826 for the year) the first on the 17th of December 2000, and the following final piece on the 20th December that year.

I don’t think that my colleagues, who are sensible ladies, found my pieces enjoyable. I heard that the occasional student who got hold of them found them weird, and perhaps they are. I don’t know. I liked them. They were the responses of a poet (myself) who found an influential voice suddenly singing off key…Like Mick Jagger deciding to do a country concert with Dolly Parton: why would he do that?

It was also a poetic response to a piece of work that ‘klapped’ me at a visceral level.

I recognised the rage, had felt it before, in 1980…and was disturbed by the highly specific denotative brutality of its imagery. I felt ultimately that the shift from post-structuralism, with its presentation of meaning through use of archetypes had been displaced by a populist dispersal of less than useful stereotypes: the presentation of the easily accessible sign, so accessible it is unnoticed and serves to reinforce those concepts we seek to undermine.

I could also say that, naturally, I would feel this. When I decided to write a series of novels, as a way of displacing the effects of a bad incident in my life, and because I was finding myself reaching a dark place as a poet, I found inspiration in Coetzee’s style (and that of Milan Kundera, Herman Charles Bosman and Elmore Leonard, not to mention Wole Soyinka and Athol Fugard and some others on a list too long to mention.) His style is that of a poet and seemed to me the most natural way for a poet to write prose.

On the other hand, were I an arrogant, self serving, self centred writer, who promotes his own work on the Internet, to anyone who can still read, then I cannot speak ill of a man who finally after many years moved over to the place where the big bucks are. After all he leaves me as the only remaining (self-styled) post-structuralist writer left on the South African (non- Afrikaner) writer’s block (pun intended) (Unless there are a few others out there like me plumbing the empty reaches of cyberspace…Howzit dudes.)

So what does this mean…Since JM Coetzee has achieved his purpose, and more power to his elbow, I felt I would resuscitate my poem essays from the back end of December 2000 and pop them onto today’s ‘Bloggo’ for your tastelessy literary pleasure. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary that may be represented in the two pieces (which contain overlapping images by the way) I do wish him well to enjoy the long hard fruits of labour.

Enjoy

17/12/00

On First reading JM Coetzee’s Disgrace.
I have just recoiled from
Reading a section of this Disgrace.
Recoiled from the horror of
Professor Lurie’s search
For truth; an unintelligible search
As most searches of this nature tend to be.

The search has immobilised him
He has become a voyeur of his own life,
Watched in slow motion. He is immobilized
In a way reminiscent of Camus’ Outsider…”Mother died yes-
Terday, or perhaps it was the day before, I don’t remember.”
Or was that my recollection of a recollection.

This man’s passive response to the urgings of his nature
As opposed to his intellect
May represent a rejection through awareness
Of the endless repetition of the events in his
Otherwise dreary day.

An empty man inhabiting
the sterile confines of Apollonian Cape Town:
the place where life is an illusion.

Sex severs his connection. Bad sex severs it badly,
And he retreats from his intellectual void to
The Chthonian* origins
Of the Eastern Cape- metaphorical place of struggle.
A place of wildest nature and societal absence.

There he experiences the Dionysian night, coming
Face to face with his karma
As his burning body transforms him into a
Physical outcast to mirror his
Inner disgrace.

He seems though to be as unaffected by this trauma as he
Was by the one which exiled him to this place,
Where the fruits of acquisition are being redistributed
Amongst the newly victorious.

The death of the Apollonian nightmare and
The return to chthonian primitivism as Paglia
May have termed it
Is Coetzee’s vision of the New South Africa, some years
Down
The
Line.

Rape is the deed that reflects
An absence of society: society in decay in Cape Town,
Society fizzling about in violence and disarray, in the Eastern Cape.
The absence of society brings out the dogs in man.

In Coetzee’s vision Society must not
be confused with Community, they may be different.

Coetzee’s Community is Patrilineal.
Petrus becomes a metaphor for the ‘primitive archetype’ but
Denotatively, African, chief, presiding over his subjects
Whom he can apparently order
To be fucked at will.

The Eastern Cape represents that return to African despotism
Which is ‘our’ (white/Coetzee’s) sole knowledge
Of pre-colonial, feudal Africa…There is no democracy
where a man has the right to be born
a king.

In this place our protagonist must pay obeisance to the
New gods of liberation…his guilt…a trivial fuck- not a grand fuck
Basically a fuckless fuck; for never does
A man fuck with less enthusiasm than does the abstract professor.

In his state of dispassion he is most passionate about a prostitute;
The student Melanie is his Lolita with spots
and stained
underwear. He has “congress” whatever that is
with a vet, who “succours’ him.

The man is dead. He
Studies, desultorily, the life
Of a dead romantic poet, Byron, who went
Off to die in a fit of ennui.

An abstract intellectual he has seen through the superfluity
Of Apollonian western society, and like the virgin
Who believed in father Charismas and the truth of the universe,
He sulks at his own revelation and sets out to spoil the illusion.

Coetzee’s Barbarians are now within
The walls…their ways those of the dark Chthonian night
Underground and in the full grip of
Nature.
They shoot the raging dogs, fuck white lesbians, impregnate them and turn them into subservient vassals.

Lurie’s sole response to all the chaos about him
Is to prep the corpses of dogs for burial: dealing
With death in the most brutal
Of its manifestations.
We are all vassals of a sort: true freedom is impossible
And so Lurie too becomes a vassal.

.NiK(00)



Later, after I had digested the book in its totality and admired the perfectly crafted images, I wrote a second piece, again, like the first, under the simultaneous influence of Camille Paglia, who’s monumental works I was reading contemporaneously, also voraciously, also feeding the poetic grist.

It came as no surprise to hear this week that Coetzee had moved offshore to that land of eternal retirement, Australia.



On Further reading Disgrace by JM Coetzee under
the influence of Camille PagliaColleague Carla demands
to know
“Why the dogs?”
in a note, written on the back inside
cover of the book.

“What’s with the dogs?”
Be they: dogs of war,
loyal dogs, kraal dogs, “my dog goes
before me for the crocodile” expendable
dogs,
mark out territory dogs?

Lurie’s daughter is marked out territory. Allegedly,
black men have come to her house, (Coetzee emerges here from
the closet – the Barbarians at the
gate are now demonstrably BLACK)
and have, apparently against her will,
entered the ‘chthonian’ darkness
of her vagina: thus has she possessed
them… and Coetzee reveals the ancient angst;
“will you let your daughter marry blacks!”:
a trusty
theme.

Who stakes a claim on whom, when the territory
is marked?

Then. The Lurie girl, is more than just a White woman.
While Lurie is a common enough name for birds,
Lurie is more archetypically Jewish, as is Isaacs;
Boerjood, perhaps, but the flavour is
Jewish nonetheless.
Is Ms Lurie a sign for a new addition
to the ranks of castaway minorities:
the marginalized and temporary sojourner?

Of course Isaacs could be a “Kaapse man”; we
know him only as another emasculated male, along with the pathetic Bill Shaw,
who
cowers from the ‘Groot Baas’*, Lurie…himself (Lurie) so emasculated,
he is reduced to fucking whores and post-adolescent
infants.

Both father, an aging homme fatale, and his phlegmatic earth-mother
incarnate daughter, screw up catastrophically
over sex.

The centrality of the story hovers around variations on a fuck: an
almost trite metaphor.
This activity is sometimes coyly referred to as “making love”,
there is an occasional ‘congress’, and
an alluded rape is dealt with
at a level of equally coy disassociation.

Lurie fucks (“makes love to”) a prostitute
in the opening scene he then proceeds to “spend the night”
with a young student who demonstrates a
most marginal degree
of satisfactory compliance. Not really knowing what to do
the apparently shell-shocked/ impressionable,
tentative, acolyte submits to
passionless penetration…in a sense she lets
him ‘fuck her a bit’. For a while; she plays Patty Hearst to his
Lord of the Manor: she possesses him
and then spews him out as less than before, as Paglia may have put it.

In the process of his engagement with Melanie
(his Lolita) we
discover that Lurie
fucks serially: secretaries, colleagues, wives of colleagues
random veterinary surgeons, friends of his wife’s,
auntie Joan Cobbley n all.

Curiously these are desolate encounters: they are
entered into with joyless abandon: it is his ‘job’,
which he performs on autopilot.

This sense of detached fornication is extended to
a “square” object called ‘Bev’, which has a useful hole in it and
which,
“succours” him.
It is a “show” thing.
a duty fuck: Lurie, the Labrador
hovering around a bitch long enough to generate a pity fuck,
before commencing to kill off the competition.

Luries’ sex drive demands rhythmic routine:
obeisance to a programme churning in his drivers:
almost if not quite, “fuck by numbers”.

By contrast his daughter is a doughy lump…a featureless
failed lesbian who is well and truly, allegedly, raped;
an act performed offstage and hinted at:
a level of discretion more commonly associated
with the
lavatory into which
Lurie is thrust to burn, smothered in lighter fuel:
something not at all cooll: burn baby burn..

Strangely Lurie does not become traumatized by this event (being burned). Like
Camus’ Outsider he
has become so anaesthetized from
existence that he has lost any sense of self.

Instead he tyrannizes over detail. He becomes
immersed in perceived inconsistencies
in the behaviour
of
one,
Petrus:
a newly advantaged, previously disadvantaged, person
who now, it seems, has exercised rights
of Prima Nocte…Droit de Seigneur: the new
lord is evident, “nou maak n lě vir die
swart baas*.” .

There is, after all, no overwhelming
evidence
to suggest that anybody else did it, is there?
there are implications: men who came and shot the dogs
and went off with
the woman. Nonetheless they are
Only accusations. No further evidence is led.
No charges laid. Lurie however assumes that Petrus had gone away
and accuses him of lying. Petrus a guileful,
disingenuous yet engaging man quite reasonably allows, that
one may suspect what one wishes…if you do not
ask the right questions then the answers you receive
will deceive those who wish to be deceived.

The issue of the boy Pollux, ironically named
for a mythical hero, and of course, a ‘bright
star’,
is then a red herring, diverting
Lurie away from the probable real truth: that Petrus
penetrated the Lurie persona.
The dogs are shot, so that they
will not trouble the new owner, no longer a guest, in future,
when day has dawned.

It is obvious that access to David’s daughter’s
chthonian stronghold (cunt, for those who are still confused)
is the key to her continued existence
on the farm…she is reduced to a vassal, another irony, in a cycle of
abuse and abusing:
a shift in role, doubly pernicious with that Jewish moniker.

In (my novel) the Buffalo Hunters*, Jodas defends his decision
to shoot his own, semi-feral, cat; on grounds that using a vet desensitises
us to the real world…the real ‘chthonian night’ as Paglia*
would call it, and also call it a
‘shit place’, in need of society.
By these standards the
man who shoots the dogs
is a MAN in the most traditional sense .

Similarly, Lurie also has a need to prove that he is a man, his sex drive notwithstanding:
so he helps a local vet, the square object called Bev,
(which is only two letters away from box…a familiar metaphor for cunt)
kill stray dogs by anaesthetic process, moving somnambulistically by chthonian
degrees from the anaesthesia
of Communication 101…The professor has
graduated to god’s assistant, fucking the instrument of death itself,
in place of some other, spotty, in-exuberant, post-pubescent, country piece.

So what about the failed former lesbian post-modern-crypto-hippie-
allegedly-raped daughter?
Well she’s ok. Whomsoever it turned out to be, should she choose to
fine tune her ‘surviving victim’
personae then
she has access to someone who will
(perhaps regularly or inevitably) want to come around
on a doggish jaunt
and give her what she may or may not want.
Assuming she could (reluctantly) drop her victim attitude of passive acceptance
she could sequentially begin to exploit her power,
generate Kugelish demands and
the unnamed ‘rapist/s’ will KAK.

Most probably this will not happen.
Coetzee is taking us on a journey into Nietzschean
Eternal Recurrence:
the past eternally doomed to repeat itself. “again and again times
without number...***”
Lurie is Coetzee’s Prufrock
extended to purposeless extinction.
He is left finally to deal with issues of death
and dissolution neither of which interfere
with, nor interface with, his deterministic dispassion.

Do we care…at the end we are exhausted and dispirited: the
crumbs we [assuming I write/read in my capacity as ‘honky’) are offered
in this tale
are meagre indeed: acceptance of a new Feudalism and
dealing with dead dogs. Wow

This Coetzee, out in the open
with the ‘in your face
ness’ of Disgrace is yet another version of the “horror”.
Conrad’s ghost haunts Coetzee, revealed in the “slim Jan”
mechanisms of his paranoia with Petrus whose ‘truth’
consists in the deliberate alteration of a ‘lie’.

Lies are important to Coetzee’s theme, lies papering on older lies on further
lies burnishing
the grandest lie of all: that elegant illusion we call, Civilization.

Petrus the “dark person” lies, specifically over
Pollux. Otherwise he is evasive...the archetypical ‘shifty’ darkie telling the former oppressor
what the oppressor needs to know: Rresistance politics – truth: subject to expedience.

Lurie, at his ‘trial’ asserts that “the girls statement
is right.”
He exercises his right to say no more, to say
nothing that may incriminate him further
or less: the truth, but not the whole truth.
He will say nothing to confess motive, and therefore guilt.
Petrus simply lies and thus obviates guilt.
They are both men after all and a “fuck’s a fuck ou pelly”* except of course
that it isn’t: there’s all that old eternal family history stuff
Clogging up the old chthonian pipes.

This central theme, the relativity of truth, remains the most profound
regarding the conundrum in
which Lurie has found himself. Self absorption
in a world of illusions is fatal to
professional well being.
Coetzee implies this to be the Achilles heel of the former, now
It seems, doomed,
Neo-Appolonia: metaphorically depicted through Cape Town and
it’s not so, too so, Liberal Arts University.

Some years into the revolution
the Luries have discovered the expendable nature of truth:
that they (assume former oppressor) lived forever in Carroll’s Alicetown
with people whom they (oppressor) did not and do not know;
and who ‘lie’ to prevent access to who they are, or aren’t,
as the case may be.

Ultimately therefore we discover that there are no codes in
Luries’ former relationships with entities of
“Colour”, which can facilitate his ability to
identify a good ‘dog’, from a bad ‘dog’ in his
transfixed escape to a ‘new’ pre-democratic
neighbourhood.
So he disposes of them all in his new preoccupation
with different minutae:
technoman fucks dogs in an emerging neo-Feudalist society…that
which was temporarily
intruded upon
by the Apollonian transforming dream.

.NiK(00)




 Nicholas Williamson. aka .NiK. PO Box 891224, Lyndhurst, 2106. RSA/Azania.
formerly blogged on www.Williamsonreport.co.za [now transformed to http://blogroid.wordpress.com and theblogospherian.blogspot.com ]
•Buffalo Hunters, The: Zone One (Gauteng) crime fiction poetry by Nicholas Williamson see: Blogroid
•Paglia. Camille: Sex and Violence. The Sexual Personae. See also Chthonian.
•Chthonian: Paglian term used to denote the rich all pervading attractiveness and compulsion of things ‘natural’ and preferably unmentionable in polite society: viz: piss, shit, menstruation, childbirth: the curse of nature’s monthly call in the case of woman, dragging her back from the lofty heights of imagination to the wracked intensity of bodily function and the dark functioning of body fluid exchanges.
•Nietzsche, Friederich (Fritz): Thus also Spake Zarathustra. Birth of Tragedy.
•Carroll. Lewis; Alice in Wonderland.
•A fuck’s a fuck ou pelly: slang SA it doesn't matter where or how you get it it's good.
•Appolonia: after Apollo…God of Reason, purity and beauty. Near first of the “sky cults” (Paglia) see Nietzsche…Birth of Tragedy.
•***The Gay (now called Joyous) Science: F. Nietzsche Ch 341
•* Groot baas…Afr: main person seriously important
•“Maak n le vir die ****baas” Afr metaphor repr: “Open your legs and let this important person fuck you.”
•Kaapse man: a man of the Cape, of mixed racial heritage..