Age of bronze, state of grace: Music and dogs in Coetzee's Disgrace

Although there is an element of self-dramatization here, Lurie's acceptance of his condition is not belied by his acts. With Bev Shaw he is more straightforward, if less acquiescent, telling her that he is "[fln what I suppose one would call disgrace" (85). And he wants to learn from his invented Teresa how to manage, as she does, in a condition "past honour" (209). The disgrace into which Lurie feels himself to be sunk cannot be equated with the public disgrace his actions and words have produced: he never wholeheartedly regrets his seduction of Melanie, the memory of whom continues to stir flickers of desire, and he has no regrets at all about his behavior before the committee. What he experiences is a deeper sense of being unfit for the times in which he lives.

What is left for Lurie after his fall? Sexual relations being at an end (the inconsequential sex with Bev Shaw seems to mark the exhaustion of this aspect of Lurie's life), there remain family relations. Lurie spends the rest of the novel in a stumbling but tenacious endeavor to be a good father to Lucy, and although his protection of her is without value and his advice to her is ignored, although he understands very little of her feelings and motives, his fidelity and persistence are not to be dismissed. On their last meeting she invites him in for tea as if he were a visitor, and he thinks, falling back on one of his verbal doublets, "Good. Visitorship, visitation: a new footing, a new start" (218). This is one of the few positive mentions of the new in the novel.

But one would not call this intimation of a new relationship the achievement of grace. Grace is by definition something given, not something earned, in the way that Lurie has earned this moment of optimism in his relationship with his daughter. Grace is a blessing you do not deserve, and though you may seek for grace, it comes, if it comes at all, unsought. This sounds like a recipe for doing nothing, or doing whatever you like," but the paradox of the theological concept of grace that I'm borrowing is that it is not a disincentive to good works, but a spur. Coetzee makes no attempt to resolve, on this secular plane, the ancient quarrel between Augustine and Pelagius-echoed in many a later controversy-as to whether a prior gift of grace is necessary to make the individual fit to seek and receive grace, or whether the human freedom to accept or reject the offer of grace is primary. If Lurie achieves something that can be called grace-which it is my purpose to argue-we cannot say either that he finds it or that he is found by it. Rather, we have to say both. In his reaching for a register that escapes the terminology of the administered society, Coetzee has often turned to religious language, and there is a continuity among three of his characters who find that, although they apparently have no orthodox religious beliefs, they cannot talk about the lives they lead without such language: Mrs. Curren in Age of Iron, who asks, "How shall I be saved? By doing what I do not want to do.... I must love, first of all, the unlovable" (136); Elizabeth Costello in The Lives of Animals, who says of her vegetarianism that it does not come out of moral conviction but "out of a desire to save my soul" (43); and David Lurie, who does not use the terms grace and salvation but often talks of souls,19 even though, as he makes clear to Mr. Isaacs (172), he does not believe in God. Although Lurie's motives for doing what he does seem as obscure to him as they are to us, something leads him in his "state of disgrace" to undertake a life of toil in the service of others. The "others" in question, moreover, are not other people; they are, on the one hand, the partly historical, partly imagined characters in an artistic work he is inventing and, on the other hand, animals." It is as if the conventional moral injunctions about the human community are themselves too compromised, too caught up in the age's demands, for his newly stark vision of what is truly important.