Unchecked passion defines not just Lurie, the horny professor, but also those blacks who rape his daughter, for isn't revenge the ultimate unchecked passion?
Pressed by a reporter about his affair with the coed, Lurie says he has no regrets, but is rather "enriched by the experience."
Later, he remembers all those women he has screwed, wives of colleagues, tourists, students, hitchhikers and whores, etc., and again concludes:
Lucy to her dad:
Lucy also thinks, "They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves."
Coetzee emigrated to Australia, but the fictional Lurie and Lucy stay on, as do nearly five million other whites, not to mention many coloreds who are practically white. I've met a few.
Though many have paid a terrible price for just staying in post-Apartheid South Africa, most have not. Many have thrived, especially here in Cape Town. Responding to my article about dockside prostitutes, as seen through the eyes of writer Henry Trotter and photographer Billy Monk, a Capetonian complains:
I've also been to paradisal Camps Bay a few times. With sublime Table Mountain a God-given defensive wall, Camps Bay's million dollar homes glow golden each dusk, as another sun sinks into the Atlantic. Retired couples stroll its beach. Blond children frolic on sidewalks. Babes jog.
White South Africa began right here in 1652. Fanning out, the Boers needed so many slaves, local blacks weren't enough, so many more slaves were brought in, from Madagascar and even distant Southeast Asia.
When the British took over Cape Town in 1806, it had 16,000 people. Ten thousand were slaves. Most of the free blacks were also treated, more or less, like slaves.
Expanding their dominion over southern Africa, the British abolished slavery, yet Boers continued to kidnap and enslave blacks, whom they rebranded as "apprentices."
Leaving Europe, Boers fled civilization. Americans did the same. Though weakening, this frontier mentality persists.
On October 18th, 1879, Garnet Wolseley noted in his diary:
Pressed by a reporter about his affair with the coed, Lurie says he has no regrets, but is rather "enriched by the experience."
Later, he remembers all those women he has screwed, wives of colleagues, tourists, students, hitchhikers and whores, etc., and again concludes:
Enriched: that was the word the newspapers picked on to jeer at. A stupid word to let slip, under the circumstances, yet now, at this moment, he would stand by it. By Melanie, by the girl in Touws River; by Rosalind, Bev Shaw, Soraya: 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.Of course lust is greed, so enriched is apt. It was never about any of the women Lurie claimed to love, but the conquering man. Ditto the black rapists. Passion isn't just suffering, as in the Passion of Christ, but selfish satisfaction. To be perfect, perfective, it has to be spent.
Lucy to her dad:
"Hatred... When it comes to men and sex, David, nothing surprises me any more. Maybe, for men, hating the woman makes sex more exciting. You are a man, you ought to know. When you have sex with someone strangewhen you trap her, hold her down, get her under you, put all your weight on herisn't it a bit like killing? Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards, leaving the body behind covered in blooddoesn't it feel like murder, like getting away with murder?"While you may dismiss it as a channeling of Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse, Lucy's a lesbian who has just been raped by three men. Screwing "someone strange," the key phrase above, is also a lot like raping, and that's its liberation, peace and joy.
Coetzee emigrated to Australia, but the fictional Lurie and Lucy stay on, as do nearly five million other whites, not to mention many coloreds who are practically white. I've met a few.
Though many have paid a terrible price for just staying in post-Apartheid South Africa, most have not. Many have thrived, especially here in Cape Town. Responding to my article about dockside prostitutes, as seen through the eyes of writer Henry Trotter and photographer Billy Monk, a Capetonian complains:
Why write about the sordid, what about the beauty of the Cape.Going often to where most visitors don't stray, I almost got mugged by three young blacks, but check your schadenfreude, I managed to lose nothing. Had those youths been more professional or passionate, I would have gotten a few nicks, at least.
Hey try Camps Bay, I took a niece from England to lunch there and her comment was that I live in paradise.
The violence that does happen here is no different to anywhere else in the world today.
It is also mainly confined to a few dormitory towns of which no visitor would normally go to.
I've also been to paradisal Camps Bay a few times. With sublime Table Mountain a God-given defensive wall, Camps Bay's million dollar homes glow golden each dusk, as another sun sinks into the Atlantic. Retired couples stroll its beach. Blond children frolic on sidewalks. Babes jog.
White South Africa began right here in 1652. Fanning out, the Boers needed so many slaves, local blacks weren't enough, so many more slaves were brought in, from Madagascar and even distant Southeast Asia.
When the British took over Cape Town in 1806, it had 16,000 people. Ten thousand were slaves. Most of the free blacks were also treated, more or less, like slaves.
Expanding their dominion over southern Africa, the British abolished slavery, yet Boers continued to kidnap and enslave blacks, whom they rebranded as "apprentices."
Leaving Europe, Boers fled civilization. Americans did the same. Though weakening, this frontier mentality persists.
On October 18th, 1879, Garnet Wolseley noted in his diary:
A Boer's idea of life is, that he should pay no taxes of any sort or kind, that he should be amenable to no sort of law he disliked, that there should be no police to keep order, that he should be allowed to kill or punish the Natives as he thought fit, that no progress towards civilization should be attempted, that all foreigners should be kept out of the country & that he should be surrounded by a waste of land many miles of extent each way which he called his farm, in fact that he should have no neighbours as the smoke of another man's fire was an abomination to him. These Transvaal Boers are the only white race I know of that has steadily been going back towards barbarism. They seem to be influenced by some savage instinct which causes them to fly from civilization" Altogether I regard them as the lowest in the scale of white men & to be also the very most interesting people I have ever known or studied.This sheds light on Lucy's insistence on being a farmer. It also explains what she had to endure. Savagery is a passion.
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