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

11 Intriguingly, Coetzee himself, in a review published at about the same time as the novel, takes Breyten Breytenbach to task for repeating "gruesome reports ... of attacks on whites in the new, post-apartheid South Africa":

These stories make disturbing reading not only because of the psychopathic violence of the attacks themselves, but because the stories are repeated at all. For in a country plagued with violent crime which the national police force-undermanned, underfunded, demoralized-is utterly unable to control, horror stories have become a staple, particularly among whites in the countryside, where farmers have died in murders that are commonly read in the most sinister light: as politically directed, as aimed at driving whites off the land and ultimately out of the country. ("Against" 52)

Another novel about sexual relations between an aging white man with academic pretensions and a young girl with wide cheekbones and closely cropped black hair set in the new South Africa is Andre Brink's The Rights of Desire, published a year later than, and with a title taken from, Disgrace. Although the catalogue of corruption, destruction, rape, murder, and mutilation is longer than in Coetzee's work, it functions more as a continuous background to the major events of the novel and is thus both easier to read as a negative portrait of postapartheid South Africa and less devastating in its impact on the reader.

13 Such a reading would need to take into account the many details suggesting that the Isaacs family are, according to apartheid race classifications, "Coloured." The resultant allegorical scheme is probably something that only South African readers schooled in the niceties of apartheid thinking would be tempted into. It is significant that at no point are we made privy to any reflection on Lurie's part about Melanie's race, or about the fact that their sexual relationship would have been a prosecutable offence for most of his life, though we are allowed to surmise that her appeal derives in part from a certain exoticism (he thinks, for instance, of her cheekbones as "almost Chinese" [111).

14 The headline provided by the New York Times for Michael Gorra's review is typical of many readings of the book: "After the Fall: In J.M. Coetzee's novel, one man's humiliation mirrors the plight of South Africa." The ANC, in its submission to the Human Rights Commission investigation into racism in the media in 1999, cited Disgrace as a novel that relies on racist stereotypes (Coetzee and Warren 128).

15 For the fullest elaboration of this argument, see Adorno's Aesthetic Theory.

16 As Katherine Herbert has pointed out in an unpublished essay, these guard dogs often were and may still be trained specifically to attack blacks.

17 The word is also used of the surplus dogs: "They flatten their ears, they droop their tails, as if they too feel the disgrace of dying; locking their legs, they have to be pulled or pushed or carried over the threshold" (143).

18 Nor is it a matter of obeying every impulse: the novel represents many impulses acted upon, and they are not always productive. We may note the ironic rhyming between the moment when "[oin an impulse" Lurie touches Bev Shaw's lips (148) and the even more blackly comic moment when "[oIn an impulse," prompted by the observation of a physical similarity between Isaacs's mouth and Melanie's, Lurie "reaches across the desk, tries to shake the man's hand, ends up by stroking the back of it" (167). The impulse that leads to Melanie's seduction, which Lurie describes in terms of the power of Eros over him (52, 89), is more complicated.