Catastrophe, Citationality and the Limits of Responsibility in Disgrace
Gert Buelens
This essay argues that J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace(1999) dramatizes how all responsibility is limited in character through what Judith Butler has anatomized as the inevitably citational basis of social agency.1I will turn to Butler’s theory in a moment, but first want to rehearse the basic elements of the novel’s plot.
David Lurie is a middle-aged professor of English at ‘CapeTechnicalUniversity,’where he is forced to spend most of his time teaching courses in communication. He is divorced, with one grown-up daughter, and is introduced to us as a man who believes he has ‘solved the problem of sex rather well’(p. 1), spending one afternoon a week with Soraya, a hostess selected from the range offered by an escort service. But it becomes clear very quickly that Lurie is nonetheless a frustrated man in many respects. He hates his professional existence -- being allowed to teach one literature course only, and having a hard time getting through to the students that do opt for his Romantics course -- and he cannot resist the urge to follow up on a chance meeting with Soraya in the street, when he sees her together with her two young sons, an urge that will result in Soraya’s withdrawing her services in the face of this breach of her privacy. Nor can he stop himself from wooing Melanie, a student of his, persisting in his pursuit when she has made it clear she does not want him, and having sex with the young woman on several occasions, at least one of which is presented in terms that do not suggest mutual consent. Lurie is driven by passions, including that of Eros, which he invokes when challenged to give an account of his actions to a university committee, following a complaint lodged by Melanie. Refusing to repent, Lurie instead agrees to resign, in public disgrace. He embarks on a prolonged stay with his daughter Lucy, who has a smallholding in the Eastern Cape, where, with some assistance from a man called Petrus, she grows vegetables and flowers for sale at a local market and runs boarding kennels. Here Luriemanages to retrieve a measure of equanimity, though Lucy and he see eye-to-eye on few things. This relative stability is completely destroyed when two men and an adolescent, in broad daylight, lock Lurie into the lavatory of the house, rape Lucy, kill all the dogs present in the kennels, set fire to Lurie, and drive off in his car. The rest of the novel is taken up first and foremost with the widely divergent reactions this attack provokes in Lucy and in her father.
Before examining this point in more detail, I must go into one aspect that I have wholly -- and somewhat studiously -- ignored up to now, but which many critics have zoomed in on:the novel’s striking racial dynamics. Lurie and his daughter are evidently white, Soraya is what would be called ‘coloured’ in South Africa, as is Melanie, probably; the gang-rapists are black; so is Petrus, who is related to one of them. As Derek Attridge usefully summarizes:
The overriding question for many readers is: does this novel, as one of the most widely disseminated and forceful representations of post-apartheid South Africa, impede the difficult enterprise of rebuilding the country? Does the largely negative picture it paints of relations between the communities hinder the steps being made toward reconciliation? Is it a damagingly misleading portrait of a society that has made enormous strides in the direction of justice and peace?2
Attridge adds that even readers like himself ‘whose view of the artist’s responsibility is less tied to notions of instrumentalism and political efficacy than these questions imply [. . .] may find the bleak image of the “new South Africa” in this work hard to take’ (p. 164).Yet he goes on to demonstrate, in the course of one of the most persuasive and comprehensive readings of Disgrace, that the novel’s appraisal of South African society in many respects possesses little specificity. For instance, its condemnation of how the teaching of literature is displaced by that of communication studies rings true across the globe; the series of references to how the contemporary attitude towards sex has become viciously moralistic can be contextualized easily for US society, say, at a time of publication when the Clinton-Lewinsky relation had just been the stuff of scandal. To the extent that the novel does address uniquely South African problems, Attridge argues that its critique ‘explores, by means of one invented life, some of the pains and strains of a social and economic order reinventing itself against this background’ of ‘a new global age of performance indicators and outcome measurement, [. . .] of a widespread prurience that’s also an unfeeling puritanism’ (p. 173).
Attridge’s point is well taken, and enables him to show, as he does throughout his book on Coetzee, that an allegorical reading -- one which would in this case insist on the social and political realities that Disgrace stages -- misses the singularity of the literary work of art by either reducing its meaning to the specifics of the context in which it took shape or attempting to derive from it universal truths about ‘the human condition.’However, while Attridge knows that one can never wholly escape the seductions of allegory, the alternative take that he proposes does not do as good a job of resisting this allure as it might do if his reading had been lessfocused on the figure of the male protagonist, whose allegorizing tendency Attridge ultimately replicates in developing an allegory of grace. I will show that, by attending more closely to Lucy as an ‘alternative center’ of consciousness -- a suggestion of Gayatri Spivak’s Attridge considers but does not take up3 --, and by examining her response to events from the perspective of Butler’s theory of performativity, we can more successfully meet Attridge’s call for a non-allegorical mode, i.e. an attempt to avoid reading literature merely for reminders ‘of what we already know’ (p. 43).
Let me first consider the rape, about which Lurie reflects: ‘So it has come, the day of testing. [. . .]. His child is in the hands of strangers. In a minute, in an hour, it will be too late; whatever is happening to her will be set in stone, will belong to the past. But now it is not too late. Now he must do something’ (p. 94). The moment is clearly presented as a crucial turning point in the protagonist’s life, a moment, too, when he will in fact prove totally unable to do anything, except undergo what the black men do who have locked him into the bathroom (such as surrender his car keys and witness through the bars of the window how they kill Lucy’s dogs after they have finished their business with her). Lurie appears completely undone by the event -- catastrophe: an overturning, ruin, conclusion; from katastrephein: to ruin, undo (American Heritage Dictionary). And he tries to make up for his powerlessness during the event by displaying a near-frenzied level of activity in its wake. That activity is organized around the question of responsibility: first and foremost, the black men’s guilt. The text vividly represents the devastation that the rapists wreak on Lucy, and on her father. There can be no question that narration and focalization (through an indignant David Lurie) make the reader feel moral outrage at the violence of their acts, at their choice of victim, and at Petrus’s (passive) role in their getting away with it all (it is soon suspected that he knows the rapists, though it takes a while before it is clear he is distantly related to Pollux, the adolescent). Throughout the scenes that follow Lucy’s rape, the debate between father and daughter centres on the issue of who is responsible (is David, too, for failing to protect Lucy, for instance? is Petrus by being suspiciously absent on the day? is Lucy for living out there in this way?). That is to say: this is the debate that David Lurie keeps going. Lucy tries to avoid having this type of discussion altogether. Through Lurie’s eyes, we see Lucy’s insistence that nobody be told as either a form of withdrawal into the private self (her failure to manage her farming business as she had done before is an instance of this withdrawal) or a form of undergoing as a private person what is really a public settling of historic scores (Lurie voices this idea and tries to persuade Lucy that this is not the way forward). We are not made privy to the full depth of Lucy’s reaction, which is rarely expressed in explicit words, and even those only uttered in response to David’s challenges. Spivak has cogently pointed out how our inability to get real access to Lucy’s thoughts frustrates us to the point of participating much more actively in the text than we otherwise might. ‘When Lucy is resolutely denied focalization, the reader is provoked, for he or she does not want to share inLurie-the-chief-focalizer’s inability to “read” Lucy as patient and agent. No reader iscontent with acting out the failure of reading. This is the rhetorical signal to the activereader, to counterfocalize’ (Spivak, p. 22).
When Lucy does speak, it is to resist Lurie’s pressure (my unconscious choice of words here makes me better aware of how his psychological effect on her is indeed akin to that of the actual rape) that she make some form of public statement: bringing charges with the police, exposing Pollux in the community. ‘You wish to humble yourself before history,’ David writes in a note to Lucy (p. 160). You are ‘meekly accepting what happened to you,’ he tells her earlier, asking: ‘Is it some form of private salvation you are trying to work out? Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?’ (p. 112). ‘No, you keep misreading me,’ she replies. ‘Guilt and salvation are abstractions. I don’t act in terms of abstractions. Until you make an effort to see that, I can’t help you’; ‘what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, at this time, it is not. It is my business, mine alone’ (p. 112). And later: ‘What if [. . .] what if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? [. . .]. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying?’ (p. 158). From Lucy’s response, in so far as we are provoked into reading her, we can derive an interpretation of the black men’s responsibility as limited by space and time. In post-Apartheid South Africa the rights and wrongs of acts cannot be divorced from racial relations, which makes it particularly significant that we are not given a clear picture of Melanie’s racial status: David Lurie, the story’s focalizer, is blind to this dimension, which, in another place and time would endear him to us: he ‘just’ loves ‘pretty girls’ (p. 218), no matter what race they are, but which, in his South Africa, can only count as irresponsibility. They cannot be divorced from the historical catastrophes whose authors have been the white dominant class; whose subjects have been the black and coloured population.
To thus qualify the rapists’ responsibility as limited is not to do the same as Lurie does in his abstracting summary of Lucy’s response, whereby she allegedly undergoes ‘history speaking through’ these black men’s deeds (p. 156). To accept such a summary would amount to a dismissal of any responsibility on the part of the individuals, which is neither suggested by Coetzee’s novel, nor by the theoretical perspective of Butler’s on which I base my reading of Lucy’s stance. Rather, Butler identifies a specific responsibility that is citational in character. I am working here mainly with Excitable Speech: Towards a Politics of the Performative, which is the most relevant text of Butler’s, in that it zooms in on rhetoric and the question of responsibility in legal contexts, just as does this novel, not only in the debate between David and Lucy about publicly testifying to the rape but also in how it portrays David Lurie’s unwillingness to speak the right phrases as stipulated by the university committee.4 The expression ‘excitable speech’ refers to ‘utterances [. . .] made under duress, usually confessions that cannot be used in court because they do not reflect the balanced mental state of the utterer’ (p. 15). Butler’s argument is that all speech ‘is always in some ways out of our control’ (p. 15), because our utterances are provoked by a language that transcends us and that was already there before we were. The human subject is not a ‘sovereign subject’ (p. 16) that can calmly send forth its dictates into the world, in full mastery and confident autonomy. Yet, the human subject is nonetheless an acting subject that performs deeds in the world for which it is responsible. The force with which it acts and the responsibility it carries for this acting are limited, however, by the fact that they are provoked by the givens of a language that has been passed down to us:
[T]he subject is constituted in language, [. . .] what it creates is also what it derives from elsewhere. [. . .] The one who acts (who is not the same as the sovereign subject) acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor and, hence, operating within a linguistic field of enabling constraints from the outset. (p. 16)
Butler’s key point is that we are always constrained by something that lies outside our control but that this something is also the motor of our ability to act. With regard to the system of gender norms, she had shown in earlier works, such as Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, that we are bound to cite the terms of a heterosexual matrix, which treats as abject all the bodies that fail to conform.5 Yet, all of us are compelled to engage in such citation, a finding which shows up the lack of inborn naturalness of all gender or sexual classification. And since it is very hard to cite wordperfectly, miscitations inevitably occur, most of which get to be promptly corrected by the coercive character of heteronormativity; some of which escape such punitive intervention, hence becoming available for subsequent citation, and thus, perhaps, contributing to social change -- to the institution of modified norms.
Against this theoretical background, what the rapists are doing can be understood as a citing both of the norms of a heterosexual matrix that subjugates women (and of which the opening scenes show Lurie himself to be a particularly pernicious exemplar, it could be argued) and, inversely, of the norms of a racially stratified society in which one race subjects another (or even others) through violent events that bring catastrophe into the lives of their victims. That such citational processes are at stake is strikingly illustrated in the novel when the men use the gun that Lucy was keeping in the house (as a half-hearted gesture of self-defence) to shoot the dogs she was caring for -- ‘[w]atchdogs, all of them’ (p. 61), watchdogs, that is, ‘in a country where dogs are bred to snarl at the mere smell of a black man’ (p. 110). The citationality is curiously doubled here in that Lucy’s own decision to have a gun in the house (she bought it from a neighbour) also cites one of the practices that have enabled a white dominant class to keep a black majority in check. So too does her main chosen occupation (looking after watchdogs) constitute a citational act with regard to the power matrix that has organized this particular society (symbolized in her neighbour Ettinger, whose farm is a fortress), however gentle and unassuming her presence in this world is; however respectful her attitude to the black people she shares a community with. In showing how the black men take command over the gun and dispose of the dogs, the text may be said to demonstrate one of the key points of the theory of citationality: the norms that we are forced to cite in order to become subjects of a social system will occasionally become miscited or hypercited. Such miscitation can happen accidentally or (less easily, given the strength of social constraints) on purpose, as when the black men turn the white person’s gun against that person. In both accidental and deliberate cases, room is created for the subversion of norms. Through such subversion, social change can and does occur: black South Africans take control over the land from which they had been dispossessed. The chiastic link between Lurie’s abusive relation to (non-white) women and the rapists’ to his (white) daughter is similarly available for interpretation as ‘mis’citation of the norms of the long-time dominant class in South African society (even if, under Apartheid policy, it would have been illegal for white men to have sexual intercourse with non-white women).
Why does Lucy insist on the ‘purely private’ nature of what she was submitted to? How can we account for her resistance to Lurie’s attempts to tie up her experience with the public realm if such a Butlerian social reading is to make any sense? Returning to Excitable Speech, we must note thatButler takes issue with those on the American left who believe in pursuing certain minority rights in court. Not only does the record, in Butler’s eyes, prove them misguided in their faith in the legal system, she is also sure that the very attempt to prosecute, say, perpetrators of hate speech (those heaping abuse on lesbians, for instance) on the grounds that it ‘produces a “victim class”’ performs the victimization that it seeks to counteract (Butler, p. 41). Such attempts, Butler argues, ‘deny critical agency and tend to support an intervention in which agency is fully assumed by the state,’ an assumption of power that she is deeply suspicious of (p. 41). What she proposes instead of such ‘state-sponsored censorship’ is ‘a social and cultural struggle of language [. . .] in which agency is derived from injury, and injury countered through that very derivation’ (p. 41). ‘The political possibility of reworking the force of the speech act against the force of injury consists in misappropriating the force of speech from those prior contexts. The language that counters the injuries of speech [. . .] must repeat those injuries without precisely reenacting them’ (pp. 40-41).