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The Swedish Academy
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2003 John Maxwell Coetzee
 "Coetzee’s interest is directed mainly at situations where
the distinction between right and wrong, while crystal clear, can be
seen to serve no end. Like the man in the famous Magritte painting
who is studying his neck in a mirror, at the decisive moment
Coetzee’s characters stand behind themselves, motionless,
incapable of taking part in their own actions. But passivity is not
merely the dark haze that devours personality, it is also the last
resort open to human beings as they defy an oppressive order by
rendering themselves inaccessible to its intentions. It is in
exploring weakness and defeat that Coetzee captures the divine spark
in man.
(...)
In Disgrace Coetzee involves us in the struggle of a
discredited university teacher to defend his own and his
daughter’s honour in the new circumstances that have arisen in
South Africa after the collapse of white supremacy. The novel deals
with a question that is central to his works: Is it possible to
evade history?"
(...)
There is a great wealth of variety in Coetzee’s works. No two
books ever follow the same recipe. Extensive reading reveals a
recurring pattern, the downward spiralling journeys he considers
necessary for the salvation of his characters. His protagonists are
overwhelmed by the urge to sink but paradoxically derive strength
from being stripped of all external dignity."
http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/press.html
"To write is to
awaken counter-voices within oneself, and to dare enter into
dialogue with them. The dangerous attraction of the inner
self is John Coetzee's theme: the senses and bodies of people, the
interiority of Africa. "To imagine the unimaginable" is
the writer's duty. As a
post-modern allegorist, Coetzee knows that novels that do not
seek to mimic reality best convince us that reality exists.
(...)
In the dystopian novel Disgrace, David Lurie does not
achieve creativity and freedom until, stripped of all dignity, he is
afflicted by his own shame and history's disgrace. In this work,
Coetzee summarises his themes: race and gender, ownership and
violence, and the moral and political complicity of everyone in that
borderland where the languages of liberation and reconciliation
carry no meaning."
http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/presentation-speech.html "After
a first strong-armed seduction, Lurie shows up at Melanie's door
and, if he does not rape her, at least proceeds without her consent.
Melanie lodges a sexual harassment complaint and Lurie is sent
before a disciplinary committee. There he pleads guilty as charged
but refuses to express contrition before a "secular tribunal."
(One cannot help thinking of Bishop Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation
Committee.) Lurie wants his crime to mean more, not less, than it
might. He would like at once to see himself as the sacrificial
victim of a new politics and to elevate his crime to the status of a
sin. He would like, in short, to allegorize: to represent the
downfall of the aloof, conservative, elegantly predatory white man.
His confusion is in not knowing whether he is a victim or has gotten
his just deserts. When he is asked to resign, he is given the
opportunity to work out his salvation or damnation on his own.
(...)
There is very much more to Disgrace than this, but it is
interesting, especially with Coetzee's other, apartheid-era work in
mind, to note this appetite for allegory arising among the
characters of a ruthlessly naturalistic novel. Several critics have
praised Disgrace as a kind of graduation from allegory, and
so it is, but perhaps the change has as much to do with recent
history as with Coetzee's internal development."
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9950/kunkel.php
(worth reading!!)
"This disturbing novel explores with clinical precision the
effects of losing power. On the widest scale, the book is about
whites in a South Africa no longer governed by whites, but is also
about being a scholar of opera and romantic poetry in a world that
values commerce, youth, and the future, and more universally, about
being a middle-aged man in a society where the power of older white
men has been reduced. One can resist change, or one can respond as
Lucy does [she is named, I think, after Wordsworth's Lucy, who
becomes a selfless part of nature, "rolled round in earth's
diurnal course, with rocks and stones and trees"
("Lucy," V)] by entirely relinquishing one's claims to
power of any kind.
She concludes that it is necessary, as a white person in South
Africa--perhaps as a white woman, since women are, according to
Coetzee, "adaptable"--to start again now, "at ground
level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards,
no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity Š. Like a dog"
(205). One may find in this a kind of zen-like serenity, but it is
also a loss of humanity. At the end of the book, Lurie gives up his
own dog to be euthanized.
While not immediately or obviously about health care, Disgrace
explores reactions to extremity and to the way in which most humans
struggle, even when they have "nothing," to be human. (The
book bears an implicit reminder, too, of the many South Africans who
have far less than Coetzee's characters, and for whom the
restoration of political power brings both hope and, for some,
revenge.) Lurie struggles to write, to create, and he learns, in
giving dogs a peaceful death, to provide a kind of care easily
translated to medical settings: he learns "to concentrate all
his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no
longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name: love"
(219)."
http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med-db/webdocs/webdescrips/coetzee1641-des-.html
"A middle-aged, divorced scholar of Romantic poetry, David
would have undoubtedly been a pathetic figure under the old regime
-- one imagines an ineffectual white liberal teaching Wordsworth to
bored Afrikaners while largely ignoring the atrocities perpetrated
in his name. But in the Mandela era, David has become a victim of
"the great rationalization": His university has been
remade into a technical college, and he teaches courses in "communication
skills" that he finds nonsensical. He is such a nonentity that
the prostitute he patronizes weekly -- and for whom he has begun
buying gifts -- stops receiving him. He imagines her and her
colleagues shuddering over him "as one shudders at a cockroach
in a washbasin in the middle of the night" and wonders if he
can ask his doctor to castrate him as one neuters a domestic animal.
This is the first of the many comparisons of human and animal
existence in "Disgrace." Coetzee has always situated his
characters in extreme situations that compel them to explore what it
means to be human, and before this novel is over, David must endure
both psychological abasement and physical torment. But Coetzee has
never before asked so clearly what it is not to be human.
(...)
...read it as an almost metaphysical journey from this Romantic
variety of love to the harsher, leaner strain David eventually
learns from life on and around Lucy's farm."
http://ww1.salon.com/books/review/1999/11/05/coetzee/index.html
(worth reading!)
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