Professor David Peimer
Nobel Prize Winner J.M. Coetzee: How His Post Apartheid Novel “Disgrace” Speaks to Us Today Globally

Professor David Peimer - Nobel Prize Winner JM Coetzee: How His Post Apartheid Novel ‘Disgrace’ Speaks to Us Today Globally

- I want to just say welcome to everybody, and welcome back, and thanks for joining us.

• Okay, thank you. So, hi everybody, and everywhere around the world, and really appreciate your coming in, and I know especially after the High Holy Days. And hope everybody’s well and families. Okay, I’m going to look at today at J.M. Coetzee’s novel “Disgrace” specifically. I’m not going to look at his other work. You know, obviously, that would take quite a few talks. And not too much about his life, just very briefly. As everybody knows, for me, one of the great South African writers, you know, of the last couple hundred years, of all time, from South Africa, J.M. Coetzee, for me, a remarkable, intelligent, insightful, and fantastically focused and and contained writer. You know, certainly not a writer of excess, or a writer of too many words or ideas and plots and stories. And I know the standard accusation, obviously about Coetzee, is that he’s utterly depressing and barren, and, you know, you just want to sort of jump off the nearest cliff afterwards. And I’m very, as we all are, very aware, for all of us have read some of his works, that that can be the stereotype response.

And I use the word stereotype advisedly because I find the opposite. I find he inspires me to feel, to think, imagine, and just see nuance and real complexity, obviously about South Africa and having come from there and what went on. But broader than that, like any great artist or writer, you know, just touching on moments of complexity in human life. So as we all know, Coetzee won the Nobel Prize. He’s one of only four writers to win the Booker Prize twice. And the Booker Prize, as I’m sure everyone knows, is incredibly prestigious prize from England, but is global. And the competition is so fierce, and it’s right up there amongst the top of prizes for novels. So he is only won of four to win it twice. And also, that he won it. And then the Nobel Prize, as everyone knows about Coetzee. I want to also just look at some key ideas that I think Coetzee focused on in “Disgrace.” And later I’m going to show just a couple of, a clip from the film that was made of the novel and then some interviews with John Malkovich, because John Malkovich played the main character, David Lurie, in the novel, and with the director, Steve Jacobs, of the film as well. It’s just some clips of interviews with the two of them. And then is time to show Jessica Haines, the Australian actress who played, you know, Lucy, the main female character. But also, it’s fascinating.

And you know, for everybody who wants to know, the film was financed by American Money, sorry, Australian money, apologies, Australian money, which is really interesting to me. And, you know, we can discuss that at another time. And one, you know, major award in Toronto and other festivals. Okay, back to Coetzee and the novel. For me, and a couple of ideas I want to focus on, ‘cause there are many in this book, is the idea of shame, which I’ve mentioned briefly before in terms of “Fiddler on the Roof” and others. you know, for me it’s a very contemporary notion, which is coming into, certainly into literature and other ways of seeing and what happens when individuals are shamed, when societies are shamed, communities are shamed. We mentioned Afghanistan, we’ve mentioned, you know, not only in England and America, but elsewhere, and many other situations. And for me, shame comes into this as well, into Coetzee’s novel. You know, the very title, “Disgrace.”

Well, you know, part of that, if we pivot slightly, you know, a response to it is obviously shame and a way of understanding that notion of shame in a global context, and certainly a literary one. Then the idea of “Who’s the victim?” In the novel, for me, they are quite a few victims. It’s not just a kind of cowboy-Indian, goodies-baddies, you know, it’s obviously much more subtle and nuanced. You know, there’s David Lurie who’s the English professor at University of Cape Town and how he is shamed and made a victim, but then how he shames and makes others victims as well, the society that judges him. And then his relationship with his daughter, Lucy, And then his relationship with his daughter Lucy, who lives in the rural farmstead, you know, Then there’s the Black South African characters who have been shamed and utterly brutalised by history, by a part, not only a part of it, but colonial history before that. And you know, so this notion of shame and victim going together are very powerful.

And of course, the image of the dog, you know, and the starving dogs who are rescued in the novel, you know, the primary image, and how the dog metaphor plays it throughout. And with so many connotations that we all know, in English anyway, of, you know, I don’t have to mention to you though, “It’s a dog life,” “Give a dog a bone.” I mean, so many phrases from contemporary society that we use all the time with the metaphor of dog and what that connotes. Then also the idea of perpetrator and victim, “Who’s the perpetrator?,” “Who’s the victim?” who’s the perpetrator, who’s the victim, and the constant shifting roles within the same character. You know, some of the Black characters, Petrus perhaps, and the others are perpetrators and victims, so it’s not quite so simple as goody and baddy. And I think what Coetzee is really trying to grapple, is say, “Look, there’s no easy answer. Obviously, some people are far more gruesome perpetrators and some have suffered far more as victims as we see in the novel.

But if we just take a little bit of the shades of simple goodies and baddies, and a little bit shades of something of the grey areas between the two, who’s really the perpetrator and the victim? And a reminder of Ariel Dorfman’s brilliant play, "Death and the Maiden,” which plays with torture and tortured perpetrator and victim. And it’s constantly going on a triangle amongst the characters. We’re never quite sure who’s which and where. And it’s fascinating that we have these kind of fluid or porous boundaries amongst these previously thought of definitive categories and the kind of, you know, entanglements of thinking, entanglements of interrelationships amongst these. And then, of course, the huge crime of history. And for me, the novel just shows a brief moment in the great post-colonial and apartheid crime of history, which is of course going on 250 years more. So, you know, and before that the crimes, even before colonisation, you know, of X, and I’m using the word advisedly, X tribe overwhelming Y tribe, you know, in southern Africa before the rival of the White colonists and so on.

So, we have the large looming crime of history and to try and identify a moment, a brief moment in history and what can we understand through that. And the whole idea of what we’ve been looking at so much in many of these lectures, you know, driven by Trudy’s wonderful spine of history is, well, when we look at the brief moments of history, how do we understand, with the benefit of hindsight, what’s going on, and the main aim, how can that speak to us today? How can it help inform us today? So not only is history a tragedy, you know, and then repeated twice as a farce, but how can something of that that we can glean just inform an understanding for us today, a bit of a glimpse. And that’s, for me, I’m looking at it today, not just as a sort of period piece of the late nineties in South Africa. And I think Coetzee would be the first to say that he’s looking, yes, that’s the period he’s writing, but you know, it’s much bigger than that.

Okay, so then to go a little bit further finally, the ideas of courage and hope and belief, and what does the worst grace actually mean? What is it to live in a state of disgrace, personally or culturally, or in a community or in a society? If the society which is labelled disgrace, it has to have the connotation of shame. It is shame. A person in disgrace, decided by who? Is shamed by the larger group. What does it mean? How to live with that? I don’t think that Coetzee ever tries to answer it in the book. I think he simply tries to tease out as many of the fascinating complications, you know, which is human nature in that. And that disgrace takes many, many forms. It’s not as simple, goody and baddy. And I think all the characters are united in this sense of coming to terms with disgrace and shame, of revolutionary times, you know, in the jargon, the transition times; of rage and hate of the past, of fear of the future, of desires, of sexual desires, emotional desires amongst them all, of father, daughter, of the utterly excluded, dispossessed, you know, literally, poverty stricken Black South Africans way out in the middle of nowhere, you know, a couple of hours from Cape Town, et cetera.

And finally, how all the characters in the novel, for me, are utterly traumatised by their past, their personal past in a family, father, daughter, relationships, brothers; Black and White. And by the greater past of the 250 years of collective memory in South Africa of colonialism and apartheid and post-apartheid, you know. And that trauma, I don’t think can ever be underestimated. And how can we get a bit of insight just in this brief moment of the brief post-apartheid period, the Mandela period and after the beginning of the Mbeki period when he’s writing the novel; and that trauma, which is almost too huge to try and comprehend. Okay, then briefly, to have a look here, this is a picture of Coetzee on the left, and of course, this is the cover from the book, and of course, the importance of the dog. An absolute ravaged and destroyed and devastated rural area of South Africa. It’s not the beautiful stunning cape, as we all know and all love, okay?

And yet it’s set in Eastern Cape, but look at the image on the cover of the book, even the word “disgrace,” the dog utterly mangy, starving, you know, just a bit of a sofa. This is an image of post-apartheid South Africa, not only has Coetzee been accused of being very depressing and barren and so hard to grapple with, you know, and seriously depressing, but also, that he does not find redemption. He does not find hope for the future of the country. And a massive attack, as you can imagine, on the writer, because of the lack of these qualities in this particular novel. And I think it takes enormous amount of guts, frankly, to do that. I don’t think it’s easy because you’re setting yourself up for a massive South African and global attack. So it’s guts for me as a writer, it really is. Okay, then, in addition, these are some of the other books that he’s written. These are some of the novels, I’m sure people know it well. For me, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” brilliant masterpiece. “Michael K,” “Foe,” based on, you know, Daniel Foes, et cetera, and all the others. Some of the autobiographical novels.

And then he is written a lot of academic stuff, and so on. But, you know, some of the other novels which he wrote, “Disgrace” being the main one, which I think catapulted him towards the Nobel Prize. This is just an image from the film, the Malkovich character, David, the professor David Lurie from UCT playing; Jessica Haines, the Australian actress, playing Lucy, his daughter, with some of the dogs, 'cause she looks after abandoned dogs in this very desolate rural part of the Eastern Cape. And then almost a classic image of, you know, of seriously poverty-stricken rural Black South Africans on the right hand side. And the image purposely set up of White and Black, the back and the face in the front; Malkovich’s eyes, his look; extraordinary performance that he gives in the novel, in the film. Okay, just a couple of ideas, which I want to mention before showing some of the clips, is just to refresh us, it’s the story of David Lurie, because important that we will get refreshed of some of the details of the narrative, so we get to grips with some of what I’m trying to say, his complexities of perpetrator, victim, shame, disgrace, et cetera. David Lurie is working as a professor at University of Cape Town, which has become called the Cape Technical University.

Now we all know the reasons why, but can you imagine Black South Africa and global people looking at that written five years after the Mandela inauguration and the end of apartheid, officially, and it’s called Cape Technical University. You can imagine the vicious attack Coetzee would get for doing that. The first sentence of the novel is, “For a man of his age, 52, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well,” an extraordinary opening line for me. And this is a guy who identifies so much with Dostoevsky and Kafka. They are his two great literary heroes, together with Beckett. But the two that stand out for him in novels are Dostoevsky and Kafka. Dostoevsky with a passion of going beyond “Crime and Punishment,” what are the dark drives in human nature that push us and yet have passion? So they exhilarate and they terrify us in Dostoevsky. In Kafka, what are the drives that create individuals who are infantilized, destroyed by bureaucracy and the corporatization of society that Kafka is seeing in the 1920s? You know, it’s not only the paperwork, the bureaucracy, but how that completely infantilizes and atomizes the individual, where feelings are irrelevant, intelligence is irrelevant; you are merely an automaton in a mass corporatist environment.

He’s writing this in the twenties, Kafka. So I think these two ideas, not just the alienated character in Kafka, but the character who is forced to evade honest communication, who has to evade some authentic core, cannot live it and is merely a conglomeration of societal forces, Kafka. And it happens in the office, you know, as Coetzee said about Kafka, it’s not just about the boring office, Kafka sees the office as fantastical experience. There’s war, there’s hate, there’s love, there’s jealousy, there’s bitterness, there’s competition. Compassion all happens in the office, and it’s a fantastical space for theatrical and novelistic invention. And then Dostoevsky, who’s dealing with these huge sweeps of history and the huge sweeps of crime and passion, of murder, hate, love, desire, in such a raw way in his books. And I think that’s what he tries to capture both. I hope the film, I think, tries to capture some of it, and certainly for me, the novel. Okay, that’s the first sentence. You know, “He has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.” He’s got a young woman who’s a prostitute, that it ends, and then he takes up with a young student.

The book opens with that, where Lurie is getting sexual satisfaction with the prostitute, Soraya. And then he gets the opportunity to seduce a student, Melanie, of mixed race origin, and this awkward relationship, it develops between him, and in the novel, the phrase, “mildly smitten professor” falls for the attractive but vulnerable young student, who’s unsure of what she wants. So, who is disgracing who? He is disgracing her. And yet what’s the attitude to the young prostitute? She is disgraced by the society. So, where disgrace and shame already are set up, it seems right at the beginning in a sexual context and in a relational context of age, like complex, you know. Then, of course, it’s found out that he’s having an affair with a young student, and he’s charged by the university with sexual harassment. And he chooses not to defend himself in the novel, to quote, “I plead guilty,” this is to the university panel that are interviewing him, “I plead guilty. That is as far as I am prepared to go.” That’s it. No remorse. So, and we get the understanding, it’s not spelled out. It’s not enough to say, “I’m guilty. I’ve had an affair with a student,” but the university panel expects remorse, society’s morals expect remorse, not only, “Okay, I’m guilty, I had an affair. Goodbye.”

So shame has to take on an extra interesting intellectual connotation for me. It’s not enough to say, “I’m guilty, I did wrong. I’m sorry,” terrible, but serious remorse. So I’m not trying to judge it in terms of fair harassment. I’m trying to judge it in terms of the bigger themes that I think Coetzee is trying to grapple with in our society of the time. And I don’t want to link to the obvious, you know, to “me too” Harvey Weinstein, because I think that’s too literal and to obvious at the moment. I’m trying to really honestly stick to the novel. And it’s not that I’ve got anything, I’m not trying to be pro against anything with the “me too.” Please, please be aware of that. It’s just what the novel is trying to say, that’s all, you try and interpret it. Remember, he’s writing it in the late nineties. Okay, so he has that attitude. He won’t express remorse. He’s stubborn, he’s arrogant. He’s a bit of a pain in the neck, Lurie, you know, why can’t he express remorse? He’s early 50s, he’s having an affair with a 19-year-old student. Why can’t he say “Sorry?” “I’m sorry I put,” you know, da da da da da. No, he refuses to let shame come in. University needs to shame him. The university needs to be seen to shame him to satisfy the needs of the society, which are demanding and rightly so in pushing.

But the society doesn’t shame the prostitute in the same way. It doesn’t require that. Why not? Sorry, his relationship with the prostitute. Because society has already shamed the young woman as a prostitute. Okay, so contemporary society demands remorse. The admission that he understands he’s done something wrong. But Lurie won’t go any further. For him, in Lurie’s eyes, in the novel, it’s a charade. And therefore, in the university panel, it’s seen as the need to give him a harsh punishment. He leaves the university in disgrace, obviously. Okay? And rightly so. He’s dismissed by the university, but not only dismissed for having done, you know, something wrong, but in disgrace. So the theme starts to play out right at the beginning of the novel. And then it catapults into his daughter, his relationship with his daughter, to Petrus, the Black employees on the farm where she lives nearby.

And then, of course, we extrapolate from the characters to the society and the world. He flees to live with his daughter, Lucy, who’s got a plot of land far out in the countryside, as I said, a few hours from Cape Town. And live by selling flowers at the market and looking after stray dogs; Lucy. And then another disgrace comes, three guys, three guys in the picture, they come in they attack Lurie and his daughter. And horrifically and nightmarishly and terribly, they rape Lucy. Okay, one of the most horrific acts any human being can do to another. So that happens there, okay? So these guys have been shamed by apartheid, the history, et cetera. And I’m not trying to draw a simple connection between the two, it’s not at all. They then act as young men, and they rape Lucy. Why do they choose it? What’s going on? And they kill one of the dogs. So a disgrace comes in, you know, Lucy feels disgraced, utterly broken, destroyed, you know, as a young woman. The father, David Lurie, feels utterly disgraced, broken, because he cannot act as the father and protect the daughter or even just be there for her in any way. The young guys dis who are raping are utterly disgraced, not only 'cause they’ve committed the horrific, heinous crime of rape, but they are disgraced for doing that as well in the bigger picture of the society. So the disgrace starts to spread out all over.

Lucy describes it not just as as sex, she describes it that the violation, in her words, in the novel, was an act of subjugation. She sees the rape in the novel as an act of subjugation. Now Coetzee is being heavily attacked for this, you know, and not seeing it as a rapist, we would understand it in other, you know, circles. I’m merely trying to bring out what’s in the novel. Lucy chooses not to tell the police that she was raped, only that her father was attacked and some property was stolen. Why does Lucy choose that? Why not tell the police? The father, he does not believe the authorities and the system will deal with what happened. She explains to her father, she says, quote, “The reason is that as far as I’m concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time in another place, it might be held up as a public matter, but in this place at this time, it’s not. It’s my business and mine alone.” This place being what? This place being South Africa. It’s a devastating couple of lines on a country which has just been freed of apartheid after five years.

What on earth is Coetzee trying to say through Lucy? Is he trying to demean the extreme experience of rape? Is he trying to say something else? You know, the phrase “rape,” you know, of how the colonisers raped South Africa of all the minerals, you know, cheap free labour to take the money back home to the colonised, the colonising fatherland. Is it as simple as that? Isn’t that, after apartheid, there’s no law, there’s crime, there’s violence, it’s a jungle free-for-all, anybody can do anything, is Coetzee saying it’s an act of retribution through the Lucy character? And therefore, somehow justifiable, or at least understandable, if not justifiable? Are these ideas of revenge unavoidable? And after these High Holy Days, the notion of revenge, not only an eye for an eye, but what role, as we contemplate the notion of revenge, what role does that play? And it’s not just Shakespearean, you know, the revenge tragedy, which was so popular in Shakespeare’s times, but what role does revenge still play, you know, in our times? And it doesn’t only have to be led by a former president or a former prime minister or a former president of South Africa. Revenge, retribution after apartheid, after colonisation? So Coetzee is trying to pull together perpetrator, victim, revenge, retribution, justice.

What is reconciliation and truth when it’s played out in the rape of his own daughter? He doesn’t give us an answer. I don’t believe he’s trying to answer it. He’s far too good an artist. He’s trying to provoke profound, profound questions of the human condition in a society in this brief moment of post-colonial history. And I think that’s what he’s really trying to do. And he’s trying to say the notion of disgrace, if we think about it with the notion of shame in a very personal context in South Africa, and now globally in a much broader context, person refuses, you know, the anti-vaxxer da, da, da, et cetera, but then somebody very close to them dies 'cause they caught the virus through them, they’re disgraced. Where’s shame? And so the story reverberates throughout our global times. How does he speak to us today?

Race and history and politics obviously all come into it. Lurie and the daughter are White, the attackers are Black, her main employee is Petrus, and it’s his cousin, younger cousin, who is one of the group of rapists. Lucy is later going to have to give up the farm, and Petrus will become the owner of the farm, and he will agree that she can stay on as an employee. Is Coetzee trying to give a pretty evocative and powerful image of the future of the country, “Goodbye, White person. You’ve had your glory, you’ve had your richness, you’ve had your everything you’ve taken. Now our turn.” As a historian, a very, very influential, significant historian I knew from many years ago, once said to me, “Look, history is a transfer of power from bunch to bunch.” Is it as veneer and cynical and simple as that? I don’t buy it, but it’s an interesting idea. Is it simply the replacement of economic and land and other resources by one with the other? But Coetzee, I think, is saying “yes,” that’s happening on the surface when Lucy loses the land, and Petrus, the employee, becomes the owner. But it’s obvious, in a certain way, in terms of South Africa and many other countries with major revolutionary changes. I think Coetzee is trying to deal with these human themes of revenge, retribution, justice, truth, perpetrator, victim, violence; underneath it all much, much more.

Lurie goes back home in Cape Town 'cause he can’t bear his own guilt that his daughter has had this horrific, tragic experience. He goes back, and also that, you know, then he discovers his own flat has been ransacked in a robbery. So disgracing, it’s happening in another level. We understand the big societal connections, but also tapping on a very personal level, very personal. So he flees again from Cape Town back to live on her farm nearby. And the other idea of Lucy saying, “This is South Africa,” you know, this place being South Africa, no point reporting it to the police or the cops or anybody else. I mean, we’ve all had many experiences, those of us who lived in the country still live in the country and love the country and passionate about it. We’ve all had experiences of this, and reporting it to the police, you know? And I’m going to be honest here, so much, not all, but so much of the corruption and everything going on, is anything ever going to happen? You know, why is the private security industry the second biggest industry in South Africa? Multi-billion, billion, billion.

British companies, American companies, German, you know, all of them are in there flooding. You know, my one play, “Armed Response” was a satire on private security versus state security, and where does the responsibility lie for policing? And what happens when you privatise the police where the aim is obviously profit, not necessarily the welfare of the person who takes out the convict. What’s the distinction? You know, my last play, “Armed Response,” was exactly a satire, you know, around all of that, funded by the Germans, okay? And the Open Society of Soros. Okay, so Petrus starts to assert his independence, he starts to take over the farm, et cetera. And Lucy keeps thinking there’s no point reporting it, which is a devastating comment on South Africa, any society in the world. You know, if you’re a woman in Afghanistan, okay, and you just left suddenly in the lurch after 20 years here, et cetera. And not only there, but many countries around the world. Okay, it says so much obviously. And then we go onto how this is starting to affect the relationship between the two, which is already such a strange relationship between Lurie and the son, the father and the son, the daughter, sorry.

He then takes up and has an affair with a woman he finds not attractive between the slightest, but yet has it. He thinks, you know, “Okay, the days of having young women are over,” and et cetera. I’m repeating this because the sexual theme, because I think it’s central in Coetzee. How is sexuality seen, not only in South Africa, but in today’s society? How does it speak to us today? Our emotions, which are so complex, and yet so utterly raw human around sexuality. And how much does society shame? Disgrace? Who is, aside from the obvious ones, Weinstein and the others, but on a normal day-to-day level, who is shamed, who’s disgraced, when, how, what? The nuances of disgrace and shame are being played out all the time. It can be in a little work context in an office. It can be, you know, in the street. It can be at a party, at dinner, meeting, whatever. What phrases to say, what not? All the rest, et cetera. And I’m not talking about only “me too” or the extreme or the PC movement. I’m not talking about any of that. I’m just talking about daily living. How do these themes of disgrace play out? Okay, then Lucy decides she will keep the child from the rape. I mean, Coetzee is pushing the boundaries. Four or five years after the election of Mandela, after the end of apartheid, she’s going to keep the baby of the rape? She says that she will love the child. She will not abandon the child, she will not abandon the land. Because the father said, “Look, I can get you to Holland.

I can get you out of South Africa. Get out.” No, she wants to stay on the land and have the baby and live there. Why? She believes that maybe love can grow, that mother nature, she can trust. She wants to be a good mother. How do South Africans deal, and not only South Africans, but many, violence around the world, deal with this kind of violence to one’s own body, to her body, to her life utter destroyed? And that the menace is always in the air in Coetzee’s writing. It’s always there as a menace, similar to me for Paton. with Paton and many others. There’s a hint of menace, more than a hint, which can spill into violence in a heartbeat or not. The writing is so tight. It’s 215 pages, one of his shortest. 215 pages, so tight, and yet so much is packed into it. And I believe that very tightness of writing enhances the intensity of experience for the reader. Okay, it’s obviously a troubling work, a troubled people in a troubled times, and we could replace the word troubled with traumatic, where everyone is ill-equipped.

Who’s prepared for this, who knows how to live and how not to in these times, face the realities of apartheid truthfully, not globally, and face the realities of post-apartheid in South Africa? How on earth to live with that nightmare of 50 year, 48 years of apartheid and 200 years of colonialism before? From all perspectives, from White perspective, mixed race, Black, White, coloured, from upper middle, you know, working class, homeless, et cetera. A microcosm of the world. No, easy answer. And what I appreciate about the novel is that he doesn’t go for the easy answer ever, not at the end or at any time. You know, not a simple quick redemption or a love story to answer it. And that’s tough as a writer. That’s guts. Not easy to do. So his daughter decides to stay, and the balance of power has shifted seismically in the country. Lurie’s been subjected to it. He refuses. He’s stubborn and pretty arrogant. And you know, and just sticks to his guns no matter what. Lucy, totally different as the daughter generation. And the Black characters, Petrus and the others, and how they are forced to negotiate these notions of disgrace, retribution, justice, hate, rage of their poverty and of apartheid that has gone on, you know, basically trauma on a major scale.

Are they just attacking the White establishment for the abhorrent oppression of their past? Is it as simple as that? Is Lucy a victim because she represents something of the Whites? Is it as simple as that? Is it much more complex than that? It’s an open question. Why do the attackers, these Black guys, choose to shoot the dogs that Lucy’s looking after on her farm? Is it because they see that they have been treated like dogs, as mangy dogs, for nearly half a century of apartheid, and the collective memory and their DNA of 250 years of colonisation? The metaphor of dog reverberates. It’s a metaphor, a parable. There’s no simple answer. Lurie feels like he’s treated as a dog by the university. He has an affair, but the student is old enough. He’s still kicked out, okay? He’s with a prostitute, it’s their choice, but he’s kicked out, et cetera. The notion of dogs, in not only in a material way, in a non-material, but he tries to use that image in an open-minded, resonant way to see what comes out. Of course, it’s not lost in any of us that as a professor at University of Cape Town, Cape Technical College, he’s teaching romantic poetry, he’s teaching Wordsworth. And he’s thinking, Lurie… And Coetzee, of course, as we all know, was a professor at UCT. He’s thinking, “How am I teaching Wordsworth?” “I wondered lonely as a cloud,” et cetera. In this context? Does it make any sense? And yet why not?

It’s remarkable poetry, it’s brilliant, it’s stunning. Does poetry need to be contextually bound only? Is it only historically bound? Can it be broader? Why not? You see Shakespeare like that and many others. And yet he’s troubled, because how can he teach Wordsworth given what’s going on in a revolutionary time? And Coetzee is troubled, like everybody and all of us who were teaching at the time and many others around the world, not only in South Africa, globally. Again, if you’re an Afghanistan teacher over the last 10 years, and now? And not only there, anywhere, in England, what’s going on? And in many other countries, anywhere, what do you do? Okay, it doesn’t have to be the extremes of South Africa or the extremes of Afghanistan. Okay, so the complexity of the truth, is it as simple as Black South Africans gaining their rights finally, as simple as Whites having lost their privilege? And that in both groups there is resentment building to hate. Is it that one desires retribution and retaliation and the other is angry because of the discontent of having been recently disenfranchised politically, economically, socially. Is it South Africa in all its horrors?

Is Lurie a victim or not? Is he a perpetrator as well? Is he punished not only for the crime of sleeping with a student, but also persecuted for his existence as a White human being who happens to be of a male gender, or not? When he leaves the city of Cape Town and goes into the wild of the rural parts of the country, he doesn’t stand a hope in hell. He doesn’t have a clue how to deal with the reality of what’s really going on out there. And he’s devoured. And is he devoured by violent retribution and the forces of retaliation? Is it as simple as that? If it is, why call it disgrace? I don’t think Coetzee’s saying it’s as simple as that. That’s the obvious sort of newspaper stuff. Much deeper is the idea of, for me, trauma. And what is really going on? And it’s a constant, as I said before, fluent mix of retribution, hate, entanglements of identity changing, and desire, and you know, shifts in social status and position and just glimpsing of trying to make sense in a quick, brief moment of radical historical change. Who’s the victim, the perpetrator, you know, and how does it change in these tragic, in these traumatic times? Is it as simple as the villain and the victim? And the perpetrator and victim? To me it’s more complex. And of course, he’s teaching Wordsworth.

How does that fit in to the whole thing as well? To me, all these cliche, the cliche interpretations of these notions are shattered in the novel. Categories of convenience are shattered and broken open and no easy answer given. Good and evil; oppressor, oppressed; villain and victim, the other and the previous; the superior, the inferior; the ruler and the other all change. Okay, so I think so much of this all comes into the novel, and very powerfully so. Coetzee himself then went to Australia, as we all know. One other thing, he won the Jerusalem Prize in 1987 for the freedom of Individual in Society. So the Jerusalem Prize, one of the wonderful prizes in the world, one of the best, greatest, gave him this prize. And fascinating to me that they chose him. And it’s called the Freedom of the Individual in Society prize in Jerusalem. I’m trying to link that. He’s trying to say, “Look, I’m an individual, I’m trying to understand, I’m trying to write a novel with all these complexities.” What’s going on? So I share that with you, you know, in terms of why I think he wins this prize, and why it’s him as a writer. Very different to the other apartheid and post-apartheid writers, in my opinion, you know, of Nadine Gordimer and others.

Okay, then, you know, other writers have written about him in many things. I want to just mention here, you know, there are lots of other quotes about Africa, about living in Africa, being there, that are in the novel as well. And of course, the objections, the the massive objections that he was faced with in writing this novel, not only from the ANC, but interestingly, you know, he was attacked not only by the ANC, but by many people. But afterwards, once he won the Nobel Prize, everybody in the world was his best buddy, ANC, everybody else. I’ll just share that with you, okay, what I would like to do is share, this is the father, daughter. This is a clip from the trailer of the movie, Australian movie made in the 2000s Australian Finance movie made in Pinewood Studios in England and on location in South Africa.

CLIP BEGINS

• [David] I haven’t heard from my daughter. Still on the farm. She thinks it’s safer.

• [Rosalind] How’s work?

• [David] They look through me when I speak. Forget my name.

• Now, let me tell you, everyone already knows about this latest affair of yours.

• [David] Really?

• [Rosalind] Story is she took sleeping pills.

• We want to give you a chance to state your position.

• [David] I’m guilty. Past sentence and let us get on with our lives.

• [Rosalind] I think Gloria’s hands are pretty crafty.

• Hold it, professor.

• [David] I always forget how far away you live.

• [Lucy] Petrus, this is my father.

• [David] I’m anxious about my daughter alone, so isolated.

• [Petrus] Everything dangerous today.

• [Woman] You must find Grahamstown very quiet.

• [David] At least, I’m out of the way of temptation. Desire is a burden that we could well do without. Should we be nervous?

• [Lucy] What do you want.

• [David] Lucy! Let me call the police.

• [Lucy] You don’t know what happened. This is my life! I’m the one who happens to live here!

• [David] Petrus is with them! I know you!

• We will kill you.

• [David] What kind of creature is this Lucifer, for though he lives among us-

• Hi.

• [David] he is not one of us.

• [Lucy] When you track a woman, you must be able to like kill them. You’re a man, you should know.

• Professor Lurie. You can’t run away.

• Condemned to solitude. He is what he calls himself a monster.

CLIP ENDS

• Okay, if you ever get a chance to watch it, I think it’s an extraordinary performance by Malkovich and a very good directing approach and an extraordinary performance by Jessica Haines, the Australian actress as well. Now, Malkovich, for me, just towers. He understands the cool, the detached, the aloof, the loss of the White status privilege and power, and all of that, and trying to come to grips and understand it. Coetzee is, I think, you know, giving it through the point of view of the Lurie character, primary. Okay, this is an interview with Malkovich and the actor and the director, Jacobs.

INTERVIEW CLIP BEGINS

• A couple of years ago when I was in Chicago, I was doing a play, and I got sent the script by my agent. Coetzee is terrific writer, and I knew him very well and had read two or three times because a friend of mine has been trying to make a film of his book, “Waiting for the Barbarians.” So he was a writer I knew, and I think he’s a really fine writer. And told in a sort of quite grim but interesting story. But I don’t… You can’t necessarily choose things by whether people will like you or not, because that sort of depends on which people. None. As far as the director, I’ve worked with so many first-time directors, so many unknown directors, so many known directors. So I don’t mind much about that. He cast people, every single one I thought was terrific. Everyone he cast, the people he crewed it with. I loved it. It’s a beautiful country. You can only sort of have, all you can do is have hope for it, hope that it continues to sort of, What would you say? Not grow, but, that they come from a difficult history as to most countries, you know, but there’s a sort of perhaps more recent, and the change is somewhat more recent, but I loved it there. Cape Town is very beautiful, and Citrusdal, where we shot, on the Western Cape, I liked it very much. We stayed in the town there, but we shot sort of up by the mountain pass, which was very nice. The Australian crew has been great. Terrific. Very capable, very good, a lot of fun. I’ve won a lot of money on bets, and that’s always, you know… They might be slightly compulsive about gambling.

• Well, first off, Anna Maria Monticelli, the producer, writer of the film, read the book. She said to me, “This would make a fantastic movie.” I read the book and it was a wonderful novel. We both agreed it would be a very tough film to make, but at that point, we thought, you know, this is such a challenge, and it’s such wonderful material, we should go for it. So Anna then pursued the option, and we went through the years of trying to finance the film, and eventually we were successful, and we’ve got a movie now. It’s very difficult to sort of put it into a statement of what something is concretely about. It’s about many things. I think that one of the elements that I’ve tried to put into the film that is in the book is the fact that when you’re in a country or a region which has been traumatised for many, many years with a history of violence, that there is a cycle of violence and revenge that is very difficult to break. And one of the characters in the film tries to break that cycle and causes all sorts of ramifications as well. But that’s just one of the strands of a very complex confronting piece.

I think for a long time about how the film will move to the screen. I try and have a unity about the entire project, including the cast, the design, the soundscape, the musicscape of the project. So I see, I try and get a feel of how that’s all going to come together. For instance, before anyone was employed on the picture, before I think it was fully financed, I went to South Africa and looked for locations for the farm. I found a terrific location with the help of a scout there, and we built the farmhouse in such a fashion that we could utilise the storytelling through images in a way that would’ve been more difficult in a less spectacular, less dramatic position. And we built the farmhouse accordingly. So the doors, windows, rooms looked onto certain aspects of the landscape. And the landscape’s incredibly important to the film, to the African story, if you like. Also, some of the music was already decided on before we started shooting. David Lurie writes an opera during the book. I wanted to actually have a piece that had a classical, operatic feel to it, which John Malkovich could play.

And that was woven into the narrative so that one hears a theme through the film, which comes to, if you like, a final fruition at the very end when it’s completed. The visual style is quite objective. I’ve kept the camera back so that you see people in the landscape, you can make judgements on their behaviour and what they do instead of actually being quite a proactive style, which with lots of closeups and intercutting, I like to let things play out a bit so that the audience can make their own decisions, their own judgements of what’s happening, which the book does. So I want people to get the information and then to make their minds up instead of me manipulating it in such a way that there’s only one way of interpreting a scene. I think the film will create controversy. Some people will perhaps have problems with it, other people will be more in tune with it. But our whole purpose was to be faithful to the intent of the novel. And controversy is in the novel, and I think it’s in the movie as well. I hope that the audience will debate what’s in the film, and in a way, take that with them when they leave the cinema. If one can portray what happens realistically, if the performances are true and sincere, then you get a believability. And I think what was essential for us was to make sure this scenario, this action, these people were believable and could happen. And if that happens, then I think the audience will be moved by them. What I like to do is to discuss what we’re doing.

INTERVIEW CLIP ENDS - Okay, I want to hold it there with discussion first with Malkovich and then Jacobs, the director. Just to mention finally, very briefly at the end now, if I may, how does it speak to us today? This book written in the late nineties and you know, more than 20 years later? And I think that the theme of when, ultimately, it’s not only about a brief moment in the great colonial and post-colonial story, but it’s a brief moment anytime where society’s undergoing major change for better or worse or both, where people are, where people question, look, reflect, think. And I wanted this over the contemplated times of the recent Jewish holiday, just to contemplate and think, “Well, are we currently in a moment of fairly seismic shifts in our own cultures in history?” This is obviously a period, you know, in the late nineties in in South Africa, what can we glean from there that speaks today that maybe spoke after the French Revolution, American, many, many others around the world where society is in such a moment of the interregnum, where the old order is collapsing and the new order is yet to be formed?

And what happens in those moments, and how do human beings react, interact, create, destroy? What forces come in of revenge and retribution and perpetrator and victim and villain? How does society try and deal with that violence? What then is there to have some kind of hopeful movement to a future? Where does it go and how? And perhaps far more than often, societies go through major change, historical shifts, and far more often than we later characterise them historically. But actually, maybe they’re happening, and it’s not necessarily on a huge scale of the Second World War, but on other scales, at different societies at different times. And in order to gain a deeper understanding, it goes deeper than just headlines and captions, that goes deeper into lives of humans. Stories that are told through literature and art, how to try and capture some of this that can, you know, speak to us today? And I think it does offer, as I’ve tried to mention, and I’ve been focusing obviously on the two ideas of disgrace, which is so multifaceted who’s disgracing who, wow, when, what, what does it mean? And shame. 'Cause when people feel disgrace in their own lives, when a community or larger and shame kicks in, for me, that’s one of the primary moments when a society does possibly shift and improve. But that’s open for massive debate, of course. And in these contemplative reflective times, I think it’s important, obviously there’s COVID, Corona, but which is a massive historical end of something and the beginning of something new, the interregnum, but there are other things going that were there before COVID and are going to be after COVID, perhaps a moment for us to reflect on.

And I think Coetzee in a brilliant artistic way tries to write about, describe moments of reprieve and understanding, but recognising not the cliche, “There’s no easy answer,” recognising there are complex nuances and we each have choices to make in our own lives in the end. Okay, thank you very much, everybody, and hope you’ve had a good weekend, you’re having a good weekend, and thanks so much for listening. Next week, Dennis and I are going to be getting back together for David and Dennis Duo, I’m not sure if Laurel and Hardy or what. And we are going to debate a fascinating topic, which I know the team will send out. So thanks very much again and hope you well.

• [Mara] David, we have a couple questions if you want to-

• Yeah, thank you.

Q&A and Comments:

Okay, Mara, thank you. “Disgrace” and Woo, Eleonor Martin, that’s a fantastic connection, which I, I purposely avoided it 'cause I only had an hour today. I’d love to go into that. I think it’s for another discussion. It’s a great topic.

Q: Rodney, why is shame?

A: I think shame because it’s been written about much more recently, when in my field, not only psychologists and sociologists, and so on, but in my field of of literature, theatre, the arts, novels, plays, it’s coming more and more into, if you like, common parlance. And I’m noticing even politicians used to use it. Here in England, the other day when the government were talking about some changes that they’re going to make now with COVID, and the chief medical officer, and he was talking about people who refuse the vaccine because they got an ideological thing about it, he said, “They should be ashamed.” And I was fascinated that the chief medical scientist of England used that word about people who, in his mind, were putting others at risk 'cause they wouldn’t have, you know, the vaccine, and use that word. So to answer your question, I think it’s becoming more and more part of common parlance. It was there before, but it’s coming back.

Betty, the movie of “Disgrace,” it’s available, I think, on YouTube. I’m sure it’s available on YouTube, and I’m sure, you know, through Amazon.

Q: Is David Lurie the same person?

A: No, this is a fictitious character, Rich Darris. Lurie is a fictitious character in the novel “Disgrace.”

Dennis, “It was Norman Lurie.” Yeah, exactly. Thank you.

Okay, I don’t know if David Lurie is meant to be Jewish, and there’s been a lot of discussion and debate about that, but Coetzee has never responded in interviews, and he doesn’t mention it in the novel at all. The only time I’ve really found is when he got the Jerusalem prize in the late eighties and spoke about, you know, Jewish and Israel in a really positive way. You know, really, he understands, understood it. Very inspiring to read his speech when he got the Jerusalem prize.

Okay, Dennis, thank you. Thanks Rich. Leon, well, he might be, but we can’t say for definite, it’s not mentioned in the novel, and as I say, it’s never been said in an interview.

Philip Roth. Oh yes, I was going to mention Philip Roth’s “Human Stain.” And absolutely, I think that there’s a very strong parallel between the two in many, many ways. And thank you for making that connection, Clarissa. Monty, brilliance deserves , et cetera. It might take longer. Bosman, one of my great favourites of all time. One of the great short story writers, absolutely. He’s right up there with so many of the other, you know, Damon Runyon in totally different ways.

Michael, Deon Meyers. Yeah, yeah, “Trackers,” it’s great.

Gerald, David Adler. Lucy, David Adler, wonderful theatre academic and scholar. He’s gone back to live in South Africa. He was in England.

Q: Lucy, “What we must do to atone for a colonial past?”

A: That’s a great question, Gerald. And a lot of people have asked that, “Does she need to be raped as an image of an atonement of White guilt for a colonial past? To me, and I believe for Coetzee, that’s far too simplistic. The scholars that suggest that, I think are being far too simplistic. Of course, I’m not denying, you know, when two armies clash, and there’s massive revolutionary and change, horrific evil, rape happens. But I don’t think we can say it’s a simple to atone for guilt of a past. There’s far deeper forces going on, you know.

Linda, no, I didn’t mention Lucy is lesbian, and thank you for reminding me. And that would’ve been seen as a disgrace, absolutely. You know, he’s writing in the late nineties, what was the South African attitudes? Nevermind, other attitudes in the world. Yep, lovely point.

Thank you. Megan, themes of shame against humiliation, resonate post-apartheid. Marlene van Niekerk, Damon Galgut, lovely writers.

Q: Okay, yeah, fascinating point you’re making, do you know Black South African authors?

A: Yes. You know, I have friends who wrote fairly soon after the end of apartheid, late nineties into the early two thousands. And I worked with a lot of writers of my generation, I mean, just many of them, you know, we had worked together during apartheid, we worked together afterwards. And they weren’t under any naive illusion that everything was going to be hunky dory after apartheid had ended. And they were amongst the first. You know, if you read I mean, his vicious attack on post-apartheid South Africa. So these are artists and to understand the role of the artist, the critic is to be the turbulent priest, is to question, challenge, ask. They’re not under illusion, and they’re not trying to just be PC with ANC or with any political party. And some of the back writers are even more critical as the turbulent priest.

Eleonor, "Thank you, Mrs. Wade. Yep. Nominated Coetzee, absolutely.

Sheila, okay, thank you so much. Noreen, it’s on YouTube, and I’m sure on Amazon. I’m not sure who the interviewer was. You know, this is just an interview of Malkovich and Jacobs. We mentioned the Jewish thing, okay.

Barbara, Lucy had a breakup of a lesbian affair at the beginning. Yes. More disgrace. You know, what happens when an affair break ups a marriage, other things, and shame and disgrace that one feels towards the other. And rage and anger, you know, in a divorce or a split up, you know, and the children, where’s the shame? Where’s the disgrace coming in there? And Coetzee is the first in contemporary writing to use the word "disgrace” as a title? And how many books you going to sell? But that is a title. It’s ridiculous. But he’s got the guts.

David, okay, thank you. Doris Lessing, yeah, fantastic book, fresh look at of the fifties. Thank you.

Okay, Sharon and Ruth. Okay, Byron. Okay, great.

Ruth, because Coetzee is, sorry, David Lurie, the professor of the English literature in the novel is of course teaching Wordsworth and has a love for Byron, and he’s trying to write an opera, et cetera. These are the romantic poets. Wordsworth, you know, in the image anyway, is the idyllic poet of the land, you know, and idyllic parts of England, not the dark satanic mills and industrialization and the hell of working class chimney sweepers of William Blake and that poetry, but the idyllic. And Byron is the romantic, ultimate romantic heroic figure who comes from an extremely rich aristocratic family, but nevertheless romantic romanticism. So on the one hand, the romantic ideal that I think is unrepresented by what he has to teach at university compared to the absolute massive seismic shift in reality of the revolutionary change happening in South Africa. And the character keeps questioning, “Why on earth am I teaching these Byron and Wordsworth at this time in South Africa? When I was at school in Durban, we learned for a thousand years every king and queen in England, almost every battle that happened in England. But I knew nothing about what had happened five or 10 miles down the road from Durban. But I could tell you every king and queen in England and every battle that happened in the English Army before and during colonisation or way before.

So I leave you with all these thoughts. I’m not unhappy I learned all that. It may be global in my head. So thank you so much for your questions, and hope everyone’s well.