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Masters of disgrace

William Skidelsky  —  24th October 2007

In the latest issue of Prospect, I’ve written a piece comparing two of fiction’s “ageing masters,” Philip Roth and JM Coetzee. The contention of the piece is that, although there are obvious and important differences between them, Roth and Coetzee are alike in lots of ways. I am aware that such compare and contrast exercises can be slightly artificial: if you look hard enough, similarities can probably be found between any pair of writers. (When I mentioned to a journalist friend that I was thinking of writing a comparison between Roth and Coetzee, he said he’d long been intending to write a comparison between Coetzee and Pynchon, so there you go.) Nevertheless, I do think that there are real points of overlap between Roth and Coetzee, which haven’t often been explored before. And then when I read their latest novels, and saw how similar they were, I thought the piece was crying out to be written. If I had to identify one thing that really makes me think of these two writers as similiar, I would say this: hardness. There is something hard and unforgiving about their temperaments, about the way they write, about the way they see the world. Some writers are soft (Updike, Dickens), some are in the middle (George Eliot), and some are rock hard. But if I had to say which out of the two is harder, I’d probably say Coetzee. Any thoughts on Roth, Coetzee or literary hard men (or women) generally would be welcome.

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  1. Aneesha Capur says:
    October 28, 2007 at 7:34 am

    There is so much to explore in Coetzee’s Disgrace and my summary won’t do justice to the one aspect I address here. I believe that through the use of a narrative voice whose authority is limited—which is that of 52-year old David Lurie—the reader is able to perceive different realities. There is, obviously, the reality as experienced and expressed through David Lurie. But there is also an alternative reality (or many interpretations of reality) that the reader knows exists independently of the punitively introspective perspective of Lurie. For example, when Lurie characterizes himself as an old man who is a predator of younger women, the reader also knows that, in reality—supported by the countless examples that exist in the present and throughout history—younger women, for whatever the reason may be, can be attracted to older men. Given Lurie’s pitiless estimation of himself and his motivations, it’s easy to skip over the fact that the young woman that Lurie had sex with a few times also had a choice in the matter: she could have begged off going to his house and eating the dinner he made for her; she could have decided not to move into his home. Coetzee hints at another interpretation of Lurie’s self-abnegating reality when he is surprised to see the young woman seated at his kitchen table appearing “thoroughly at home.” Lurie realizes “she is learning to exploit him and will probably exploit him further. But if she has got away with much, he has got away with more.” None of these facts that do exist in the narrative (however filtered we might receive them through Lurie’s point of view) justify Lurie’s actions, but they put his perspective into context and allow the reader a glimpse of the complexities of human interaction—the spectrum of motivations and range of desires—that exists in the world that constitutes Disgrace. Coetzee’s use of point of view to create this consciously artificial reality opens for debate whether Lurie’s incessantly punitory view of himself makes him a more morally benign or repugnant character.
    In her essay in the London Review of Books on Disgrace, Elizabeth Lowry says that Coetzee is “preoccupied with narrative voice and form, with the means by which the fictional illusion is created and by which it can be disrupted.” Later in the essay, she explains:
    “When Coetzee began to write, in the Seventies, he was one of the first South African novelists to act on the realisation that narrative is not ideologically neutral, but a product of history, impregnated with all sorts of subliminal cultural nuances. Realism, with its time-honoured ways of putting across a single point of view – the omniscient narrator, an implied author who is always authoritative, a reassuring degree of closure and so on – is the narrative mode most strongly identified with the Western novel. Coetzee’s metafictions follow from the insight that a post-colonial novel aiming to make a point about the cultural arrogance of the coloniser cannot use realism as the vehicle for its critique without being undermined by its failure to challenge the conventions of the tradition it wishes to call into question.”

    I do believe the narrative voice Coetzee employs in Disgrace is intentionally contextual; its reliability extends in so far as we are willing to or, more appropriately, allowed to—since Coetzee sets limits to which we can—delegate authority to the narrator, David Lurie.