In the middle of the mayhem, Coetzee inserts this reflection, "He speaks Italian, he speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest Africa. He is helpless, an Aunt Sally, a figure from a cartoon, a missionary in cassock and topi waiting with clasped hands and upcast eyes while the savages jaw away in their own lingo preparatory to plunging him into their boiling cauldron. Mission work: what has it left behind, that huge enterprise of upliftment? Nothing that he can see."
With a burnt ear and all his hair burnt off, perfective tense, Lurie also muses:
To the police, she only reports being robbed. When the boy rapist turns out to be related to a man, Petrus, she has sold land to and employed, Lucy does nothing.
Petrus' complicity is also indicated by his convenient disappearance on that terrible night. As her closest neighbor, and also a friend, so she thought, Petrus would certainly be expected to come to Lucy's rescue.
It gets even weirder. Finding out she's pregnant from the rape, Lucy decides to keep the baby, and not from any religious conviction. She has told her dad there's no higher life, "This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals."
She's also made peace with the fact that her baby's father may be the boy rapist. Having moved into Petrus' house, he's now her neighbor. When Lurie beats the boy after catching him peeping outside Lucy's window, she's not mad at the youthful monster, but her father!
Most astoundingly, Lucy's willing to give her land to Petrus and even to marry him, just to be unharmed. She tells Lurie:
Her urban and urbane father, too, has moved to the country, but not into her home. Taking a room in nearby Grahamstown, Lurie can visit Lucy regularly, and his grandson, too.
"What will it entail, being a grandfather? As a father he has not been much of a success, despite trying harder than most. As a grandfather he will probably score lower than average too. He lacks the virtues of the old: equanimity, kindliness, patience. But perhaps those virtues will come as other virtues go: the virtue of passion, for instance. He must have a look again at Victor Hugo, poet of grandfatherhood. There may be things to learn."
Easing up on passion, Lurie still thinks of it as a virtue, but that's another of Coetzee's jokes, or jabs, at his protagonist. Another is Lurie's affair with Bev. Yes, the one he found so repulsive.
After their first congress, dutifully performed on the floor in the animal clinic, our aging playboy reflects, "Let me not forget this day, he tells himself, lying beside her when they are spent. After the sweet young flesh of Melanie Isaacs, this is what I have come to. This is what I will have to get used to, this and even less than this."
Although Lurie has insisted he was too old to change, he's been transformed, into one who even cares deeply about the abandoned dogs at Bev's clinic. After their lame lovemaking has petered out, he's still her unpaid assistant, a conscientious dog man.
With a burnt ear and all his hair burnt off, perfective tense, Lurie also muses:
It happens every day, every hour, every minute, he tells himself, in every quarter of the country. Count yourself lucky to have escaped with your life. Count yourself lucky not to be a prisoner in the car at this moment, speeding away, or at the bottom of a donga with a bullet in your head. Count Lucy lucky too. Above all Lucy.Though this violence is Disgrace's most startling incident, it's not its main thrust. Lucy's response is.
A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them.
To the police, she only reports being robbed. When the boy rapist turns out to be related to a man, Petrus, she has sold land to and employed, Lucy does nothing.
It gets even weirder. Finding out she's pregnant from the rape, Lucy decides to keep the baby, and not from any religious conviction. She has told her dad there's no higher life, "This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals."
She's also made peace with the fact that her baby's father may be the boy rapist. Having moved into Petrus' house, he's now her neighbor. When Lurie beats the boy after catching him peeping outside Lucy's window, she's not mad at the youthful monster, but her father!
Most astoundingly, Lucy's willing to give her land to Petrus and even to marry him, just to be unharmed. She tells Lurie:
"Go back to Petrus," she says. "Propose the following. Say I accept his protection. Say he can put out whatever story he likes about our relationship and I won't contradict him. If he wants me to be known as his third wife, so be it. As his concubine, ditto. But then the child becomes his too. The child becomes part of his family. As for the land, say I will sign the land over to him as long as the house remains mine. I will become a tenant on his land."Although Lurie fights against each of Lucy's concession or surrender, it's not his life to decide:
"How humiliating," he says finally. "Such high hopes, and to end like this."This Boer, then, will accept outrageous conditions just to be allowed to stay on her land, in her South Africa, and since she's a true Boer, a farmer, she won't even go to Cape Town, much less Amsterdam.
"Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity."
"Like a dog."
"Yes, like a dog."
Her urban and urbane father, too, has moved to the country, but not into her home. Taking a room in nearby Grahamstown, Lurie can visit Lucy regularly, and his grandson, too.
"What will it entail, being a grandfather? As a father he has not been much of a success, despite trying harder than most. As a grandfather he will probably score lower than average too. He lacks the virtues of the old: equanimity, kindliness, patience. But perhaps those virtues will come as other virtues go: the virtue of passion, for instance. He must have a look again at Victor Hugo, poet of grandfatherhood. There may be things to learn."
Easing up on passion, Lurie still thinks of it as a virtue, but that's another of Coetzee's jokes, or jabs, at his protagonist. Another is Lurie's affair with Bev. Yes, the one he found so repulsive.
After their first congress, dutifully performed on the floor in the animal clinic, our aging playboy reflects, "Let me not forget this day, he tells himself, lying beside her when they are spent. After the sweet young flesh of Melanie Isaacs, this is what I have come to. This is what I will have to get used to, this and even less than this."
Although Lurie has insisted he was too old to change, he's been transformed, into one who even cares deeply about the abandoned dogs at Bev's clinic. After their lame lovemaking has petered out, he's still her unpaid assistant, a conscientious dog man.
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