Novels

Questions and Proposals about J.M. Coetzee’s novel, “Disgrace”

Questions and Proposals about J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999)

(For future readers/ users of this website: Please note that the page numbers indicated below refer to the Viking 1999 edition of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.)

  1. David Lurie’s habit of aestheticizing his experience:

Pay attention to the way David Lurie thinks. He is in the (almost constant) habit of aestheticizing his experience, especially his experience of desire and sex. Sometimes this aestheticizing, as I am calling it, will take the form of his drawing an analogy between his experience and a work of art—a work of literature, or a painting, or a piece of music. An example of this comes on p. 19, right after he and Melanie have had intercourse for the first time. “After the storm, he thinks: straight out of George Grosz.” (George Grosz, for those of you who don’t know, was a German Expressionist painter known especially for his pen and ink drawings satirizing the German nation and—perhaps most relevant to Disgrace–Berlin nightlife, during and after World War I.) And sometimes Lurie’s “aestheticizing” will amount to his referring away from his immediate experience to an established cultural understanding of what the experience has meant, for others, in the past (as contrasted with what it is meaning, for him, in the present.) An example of this tendency falls on page 12. Lurie is putting a Mozart recording on his stereo as a means to seduce Melanie.

“Wine, music: a ritual that men and women play out with each other. Nothing wrong with rituals, they were invented to ease the awkward passages. But the girl he has brought home is not just thirty years his junior: she is a student, his student, under his tutelage. No matter what passes between them now, they will have to meet again as teacher and pupil. Is he prepared for that?”

How does this proclivity towards the “aesthetic” shape David Lurie’s experience? Does it bring him closer to that experience, or does it act as a boundary to experience—or

are these (perhaps in David Lurie’s view) not the questions to be asking? Lastly, do you feel that the changes that happen in his life across the novel—changes effected both by the scandal of his affair with Melanie, and by the events at his daughter’s farm—shake him out of this “aestheticizing” tendency? If so, what do those changes leave in its place?

 

2. David Lurie’s preoccupation with time, in particular with the “perfective” tense.

At several points in the novel, David Lurie will consider his experience in terms of verb tenses, in particular the “perfective” tense, which represents an action “carried through to its conclusion.” Live, drive, burn and usurp are verbs that appear throughout the novel in the perfective tense, with ever broadening significance. The following excerpt shows Lurie thinking through this problem as it relates to his new life at his daughter’s smallholding:

“Two weeks ago he was in a classroom explaining to the bored youth of the country the distinction between drink and drink up, burned and burnt. The perfective, signifying an action carried through to its conclusion. How far away it all seems! I live, I have lived, I live.” (p. 71)

How is this state—of being concluded, finished, “seen through to one’s conclusion”—an adequate figure for the person of David Lurie? And how is this temporal structure embodied in the novel’s larger story?

3. Trials, Hearings, Public Declarations of Feeling or Personal Truth

There are several “hearings” or “trials” in the novel, or, more precisely, several instances in which a character is asked to declare the contents of his or her private experience, feelings, motives, etc., in a public setting. To name a few examples: David Lurie is asked to deliver a convincing statement of penitence during a disciplinary hearing for sexual harassment at his workplace, the Cape Technical University, a request he ultimately refuses; Lucy is repeatedly urged by her father to press charges against the three men who raped her, a request she refuses; in an ironic turn, David then willingly submits a confession of motives for his sexual encounter with his student,

Melanie Isaacs, to her family, though not in a public setting, rather in the Isaacs’s home.

Do you detect a theme here? It seems that the novel has something to say about our private selves versus our public and/or social selves, and, following from this, about the capacity of the public realm to house or to represent, with any fairness or adequacy, the contents of our private subjectivity. Does this proposal resonate with your understanding of the book?

Related to this issue is a trickier, more complicated one about the nature of language, in particular about the failure of language to unite individuals who are divided against one another in a single, continuous understanding. That is what we believe language ought to do—bridge misunderstanding, help us commune, and, in the communing, heal. But in a world as “burnt” as post-Apartheid South Africa, words, Coetzee seems to be saying, are just more weapons to be hoarded, foe against foe. A depressing estimation of the powers of language, coming from a novelist of the aesthetic and ultimately ethical ambition of J.M. Coetzee; and yet should we turn from the novel only in despair? A vexing question, if you believe, as many in our group do, in the power of stories to instruct and to heal; and therefore a good question to take up when we meet.

4. Dogs/ dog euthanasia

If the euthanizing of dogs stands for you as an appropriate destiny for David Lurie, why do you think it’s appropriate?

5. David Lurie as outsider/ David Lurie as insider:

In almost every sphere of the novel’s activity, David Lurie is an “outsider” (141). As a self-proclaimed “disciple” of William Wordsworth, he is an outsider to the “rationalized” view of language held by the Communications Department of which he is a faculty member (see pp. 3-4); after the revelation of his affair with his student, Melanie Isaacs, he becomes an outsider to academic life generally; he is an outsider to his daughter Lucy’s experience of her rape and, more broadly, to female reproductive life and to female suffering; he is an outsider to the life—and death–of animals, as are we all; and he is an outsider to the logic informing Petrus’s decisions as regards the securing and maintenance of a black-run agricultural economy in the Eastern Cape of South Africa.

In smaller, more immediately inter-personal ways, too, Lurie is an outsider: an outsider to the definition of friendship held by Bill Shaw, and an outsider as well to the Christian view of repentance held by the Isaacs family, in particular by Melanie Isaacs’s father.

However, in one realm of his life, in one ultimately very substantial realm, David will become an insider, even a kind of master–and that is in the realm of art. By the last pages of the novel, he knows exactly how to write his opera; indeed, you’ll notice that the subject of the first sentence of the last chapter in the novel is not a character in that novel—a novel that has taken David Lurie to the furthest extremes of his identity, nearly effacing that identity—rather a character in David’s work of art, David being the writer now, David the one responsible for seeing souls, of his own creating, “through to their conclusion” (p. 71). What do you make of this development? If art is to function for David as a kind of salvation, how will it save him? Will it save him in a way that might matter to more people than just David? How do you think David would weigh in, here? Maybe he’d tell us that that’s not the question to be asking.

6. Is it possible for a work of art to save but not to console?

Disgrace, we might argue, is one such work of art. Do you agree? Why, or why not?

Questions and Proposals about Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (1955).

Study Questions for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955).

(For future users of this website, the edition of Lolita referred to in the questions below is Alfred Appel’s The Annotated Lolita, Vintage Books, 1970.)

 Proposal/Elucidation #1: Humbert Humbert as Writer

Probably the most important thing to keep in mind about Humbert Humbert is that he is writing. He has fifty-six days until his trial, a trial he knows will probably result in his death, and what he does with the time is write. He writes his life as a work of art. Not as a work of autobiography, mind you, and not of confession–not, certainly, of self-justification—-Humbert is too smart for that–but as a work of art in whose first paragraph he will analogize his own predicament with perhaps one of the most sacred images of the history of western culture, the crown of thorns placed on Jesus’ head at the Crucifixion. “Look,” Humbert concludes the first paragraph to his opus, “at this tangle of thorns.” In Humbert, then, we are dealing with an artist, or, to be fair, a man who thinks he is an artist, and who esteems his story as capable of shaping nothing less than his reader’s consciousness, just as was the story of Christ.

If we keep this in mind—-that H.H. is writing his life as art–we may have an easier time accounting for the many kinds of language he uses to do so. At many points in his narrative Humbert will write in a language of heartbreaking precision, especially in his descriptions of Lolita-the-real-girl—-and here I am thinking, for example, of her “sooty eyelashes,” or, as she rides her bicycle, her “one hand dreaming in her print-flowered lap.” This kind of language makes me feel something of Humbert’s humanity, and makes me feel that he has seen something of Lolita’s, too. But Humbert also writes in a language, or language-s, that feel more performative than genuine, language that is ornate, fussy, high-falootin’ (“You sound like a book, Dad”), needlessly literarily allusive, needlessly French, shamelessly alliterative (“dwelt delicately”), at times archaic, at times abstruse, at times very capably and idiomatically American, at times purply poetic, nearly always entertaining (or so I would argue); and, perhaps most important for our purposes, emotionally very hard to decipher, for Humbert’s ineluctable drift toward irony, parody, and caricature, the cruelest of his caricatures, perhaps, those of himself. The sheer density of his prose, its brocaded, embroidered, thorn-interlaced, almost material feeling thing-like-ness, should be thought of not as Vladimir Nabokov’s “window” onto Humbert’s “reality,” but as Humbert’s performance of what he wants his readers to believe that reality was like.Does viewing the novel this way—as Humbert’s eleventh hour opus—change or influence your attitude towards it? And, secondly, do you feel that life can be like that—-that our way with words sometimes creates not our true selves, but our masks?

Proposal #2: First Chapter as “Contract” With Its Reader

Another way to get on terms with Lolita is to concentrate on its first chapter. As Peter Turchi taught me in a lecture on Lolita at Warren Wilson’s MFA program—this was several years ago–a great novel will draw up “contract” with its reader in its first pages—-it will show you, in condensed form, the laws of the world about to unfold. Note, for instance, that in the novel’s second and third sentences, the emphasis is on the word, not the person: “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” Note the author’s seeming pleasure in syllabling the word into its separate sounds, then his virtuosity in immediately arriving at several new “ee” and “tee” words which, joined together in a sentence, describe how the sound “Lolita” gets made in the mouth: “tip,” “tongue” “taking” “trip, “three,,” “teeth,” “tip,” “palate.” Note the author’s preoccupation with the way the word “Lolita” affects him: “My sin, My soul.” Already, in sentence two, we intuit something of this author’s (ultimately monstrous) solipsism.

Also, did anyone notice how short that first chapter is? With his cursory reference to Lolita’s “precursor,” Humbert mocks those realistic novels that provide, in their first chapters, a psychological or historical explanation for the protagonist’s current behavior or crisis. You might also note the math problem H.H. asks you to perform if you’re to figure out when it was that H.H. was involved with that precursor: “About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer.” We don’t realize it, but as we pretzel our heads around that formulation, we are engaging the first of the many number-games arrayed for us by the trickster-gamester Humbert Humbert, games, coincidences, doublings, labyrinths and privately determined numerologies comprising a kind of tracery of the convolutions of Humbert’s mind.

In focusing on single sentences I mean to demonstrate the delicacy of attention required of us if we’re to understand the novel’s meanings. We may decide we don’t like that kind of novel, but if we’re going to proceed with Lolita—if we’re going to be good stewards of it, in a sense—best, probably, to take down our dictionaries, to take down our French-English dictionaries, even, to ready our pens and our reading journals, to poise ourselves to hover over the word. Have you found, during the days or weeks you’ve been reading Lolita, a heightened awareness to words generally, to their lives and after-lives, their percussions and re-percussions? Some novels, like Lolita, will train us in a new kind of attention: what aspect of your experience has this new attention revealed?

Proposal/ Question #3: What Kind of Person is Humbert Humbert?

What kind of person is Humbert Humbert? In deciding that he is a monster—-which is how I myself have been referring to him in previous questions—-might be we be limiting the novel’s potential to teach us something about ourselves? What sort of person holds a resolutely ironic stance towards his feelings and those of others; seeks coincidence and an almost mystical patterning in the events that make up his story; prefers obsession and lust to acceptance and supportive familial and/or conjugal relationship; repeatedly aggrandizes and distorts his own image, often to the total disregard of the realities of other people; believes in fate; revels in the melancholic recognition of the passage of time and love; seeks the structured, the patterned, the intentional—-the artful—-in all things; sees himself as the center of the universe, all reality merely a projection of his subjective state?

Not my sort of person, I dearly hope, and not yours either; but surely these are habits of psychology we have all struggled to overcome. One of my dilemmas in reading the novel these last weeks has been articulating why Humbert needs to be so horrible and horrifying for the novel to reveal something universal in our humanity. Could Nabokov have taught us the same lesson, I ask myself, without Humbert’s having stolen Lolita’s childhood? Why the extremity, why the perversity, why the nightmare? “There is much sense in Humbert’s madness,” writes the scholar Michael Wood, “but of course we shan’t see it unless we see the madness too.” And this is a theme we’ve wrestled with in previous meetings; the Misfit, from Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” is arguably one of the most intelligent and sympathetic characters she ever wrote—yet he is a murderer. Why is it that so many writers seek to reveal the natural in our nature through the least natural among us? I genuinely don’t know the answer myself—and open the question to the group.

A corollary to the question above: Why do the sexual encounters between H.H. and Lolita, so troubling to read, need to be in the story? I would argue that they do need to be there; that for the story to “enchant” us, it must engage us at the level of our “spines” (and Nabokov once said that for a story to be great it had to engage the reader at the level not just of the mind, but of the “spine.”) Also, why do you think Nabakov chose to make Lolita twelve, as opposed to, say, six? And why didn’t he monstrous-ize Humbert’s appearance and bearing? Why is Humbert made to seem sort of attractive?

Proposal/ Question #4: “Somehow his horrid scrapes become our scrapes”

The following is a set of remarks from The Magician’s Doubt, a monograph on Nabokov’s novels I highly recommend, by the very delicate reader–and professor of English at Princeton University—Michael Wood.

“We might […] say that while Humbert writes wonderfully about his own deviance, he can’t write himself straight; and the thinness of his repentance is a measure of the weird, lingering humanity of his crime. He has been involved in ‘intricately sordid situations,’ as the scholar, F. W. Dupee says, but somehow ‘his horrid scrapes become our scrapes’. Not literally or legally, we hope, but closely enough for all but saints and hypocrites. Love itself, of the least deviant kind, is scarcely less possessive or crazed than Humbert’s mania.” (Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubt, (Princeton University Press, 1994) pp. 140-141.)

Do you agree with Wood? Does the novel, as Wood seems to imply, have something to teach us about “love itself”?

Proposal/ Question #5: What do you make of Quilty?

We have talked over these past months about a novel’s central character being “foiled” by another character that seems to represent that first character’s perfect challenge. And certainly we could say this of Quilty—that he “foils” Humbert. He also seems a kind of double to Humbert—a shadow, a shade, a reflection, an inversion. (Doubling happens all over the novel; for a brilliant analysis of why this might be so, see Alfred Appel’s introduction to his The Annotated Lolita (Vintage Books, 1970)). When we meet on Monday, I would like to look over Chapter 35, the chapter in which Humbert kills Quilty. Figuring out the ways in which Quilty foils Humbert—and also, in kind of infinite regress, repeats and repeats and repeats him—may prove useful in articulating the novel’s (yes) moral offering.

Proposal/ Question #6: Can we believe that Humbert Humbert really “loved” Lolita?

Toward the end of Chapter 29—the chapter in which Humbert goes to find Lolita–Humbert declares to his reader that he “loved” her. (In Appel’s annotated edition, this happens on pp. 277-278).

Please reread this passage again, and, if possible, please reread it within the context of Chapter 29 as a whole. Do you believe Humbert? We’ll talk about why we do or we don’t when we meet.

Proposal/ Question #7: Why Read This Book?

Peter Turchi recently sent me the title for the talk he’ll be giving at All Souls in February, and it goes like this: “The Bright Side of Darkness: Stories and Novels that Take Us Places We Don’t Want to Go to Meet People We Don’t Want to Meet Doing Things We Don’t Want Anyone to Do; and Why We Should Read Them Anyway.”

Have you articulated for yourself a reason to read Lolita—a reason perhaps more substantial than the sheer pleasure of its surface effects: its linguistic play, the elegance of its structure, the fun to be had in solving its puzzles and games? If you have articulated this larger reason, what is it?   And if you haven’t, why does the novel ultimately disappoint you? I myself promise to articulate why I believe the novel is worthwhile—but not until I hear from you.

Proposal/ Question #8: An Ape Drawing the Bars of His Own Cage

 To the question of where he found the inspiration for Lolita, Nabakov replied: “As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.”

How might this image—an ape drawing the bars of his own cage—stand as an adequate metaphor for Humbert Humbert?

Looking forward to seeing you Monday,

Emilie