Eros Enters

“Morals have bedded with story-telling since the magic of the imaginative capacity developed in the human brain.” So wrote South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer in 1988, one year before the end of apartheid, three years before her acceptance of the Nobel Prize for literature. Politics, on the other hand, “somehow followed morals in, picking the lock and immobilizing the alarm system.”

Politics has been picking the lock of South African literature for years, under the unconscionable cloud of apartheid and, more recently, under the unbearable sunshine of truth and reconciliation. Yet in his latest novel, “Disgrace,” which won him an unprecedented second Booker Prize this year, the South African writer J.M. Coetzee writes a morality tale in which good and bad wander about in a mist as thick as the Tafeldoek that blows down on a southeaster to block Capetown from the sun.

“Disgrace” is disarming in the simplicity of its story and the speed with which it hurries the reader down the page. David Lurie, a 52-year old divorce, is forced to resign his position as professor of Romance literature at Capetown University after admitting to an affair with a young student named Melanie. At loose ends, he flees the public disgrace and visits his only child, Lucy, who lives on a dirt farm near Salem on the Eastern Cape, 500 miles to the east. With only the vaguest notion of a project to occupy his mind (an opera about Lord Byron and his mistress, the Contessa Teresa Guiccioli), David joins Lucy’s routine--attending to her dogs, weeding her garden, accompanying her to the weekly market and, in his spare time, assisting Lucy’s friend Bev at the local animal shelter.

Then one quiet afternoon, when their only neighbor happens to be away, three strangers appear at the farm asking to use the telephone. Although David and Lucy survive the attack, he is badly burned, she brutally raped and the dogs mercilessly shot. Lucy sinks into depression and pregnancy and encourages David to return to Capetown alone. Yet there is no home for David to return to. His Capetown house has been broken into, ransacked and defiled. Back in Salem, he takes up where he left off, leading condemned dogs from their kennels to Bev and her waiting needle.

Simple and bleak, one might say. From the start, however, a canker of moral inquiry gnaws at the story’s simplicity. The very first line of “Disgrace” suggests that life is not measured simply in its living. Life is a series of problems that must be solved. And yet David Lurie’s pilgrimage back and forth across the southern rim of Africa from Capetown to Salem, from Melanie to Lucy and back, leads him to solutions that are anything but simple.

Look at the story again, starting from that first line. “For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced,” the novel opens, “he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.” Before his affair with Melanie, before his fall from academic grace in Capetown and his flight to Salem, David used to spend every Thursday afternoon between 2 and 3:30 in the company of an employee of Discreet Escorts named Soraya. But a chance intersection of paths uncovers another reality: Soraya is also the middle-class mother of two young boys. The following Thursday, Discreet Escorts informs David that Soraya is indisposed. He traces her phone number and calls. She hangs up in anger.

Yet all is not lost. As a university professor, David is surrounded by numerous solutions to the resurgent “problem of sex.” His class on Byron is full of young hearts and minds in whom he tries to instill a passion. He reads to them of Eros and the fallen angel, Lucifer:

He could

At times resign his own for others’ good,

But not in pity, not because he ought,

But in some strange perversity of thought,

That swayed him onward with a secret pride

To do what few or none would do beside;

And this same impulse would in tempting time

Mislead his spirit equally to crime.

*

One of the students, the waif-like Melanie Isaacs, responds with what David takes to be equal passion. Then one day, David is served a request to appear before a faculty committee. Melanie has charged him with sexual harassment. “Eros entered,” is David’s simple plea. Yet, once again, another reality has intruded on David’s world. In the same way that Cape Technical University became the new name for the former Cape Town University College and the department of classics and modern languages was re-christened communications “as part of the great rationalization,” so has “affair with a student” been branded with the scarlet “sexual abuse.” “He does what he feels like,” as one student explains the Byronic Lucifer’s conduct. “He doesn’t care if it’s good or bad. He just does it.”

Yet is David Lurie, fallen angel that he might be, insensitive to good and bad or just unable to tell the difference? Out at Lucy’s farm, he doubts, with the blindness perhaps of a father from another generation, the wisdom of his daughter’s domestic arrangements: A lesbian and a vegetarian, Lucy lives alone in the wilderness with a newly landed black farmer named Petrus as her only neighbor. After the attack, however, David gives Lucy several eminently reasonable pieces of advice--report the rape to the police, identify the assailants, sell up and move up to the Netherlands with your mother. Lucy refuses all. Her future is on her farm. Perhaps she will put herself under the protection of Petrus and join his harem as his third wife, mingling her land and life with his.

In Lucy’s world, survival is predicated on darkness. In Melanie’s world, everything must be exposed to the light. In between is Melanie’s father, whom David visits on his flight from Salem back to Capetown in a vague search for something that might be absolution for his affair or the solution to a larger problem. Yet good and bad are absent from this other father’s discourse, replaced by the dice-rolling of destiny. “The path you are on,” he tells David, “is one that God has ordained for you. It is not for us to interfere.” Some solution.

Undoubtedly, “Disgrace” can be read as a political guide to the path that has been ordained for South Africa, although novelists like Andre Brink and Breyten Breytenbach have strewn that path with images far more horrifying. What compels a reader to wrestle with the complex moral angels that Coetzee conjures up from the Cape is a simplicity of character and prose that is anything but simple to produce. One suspects that “Disgrace” will continue to perplex and disturb long after South Africa, and the rest of our worlds, find the path back to grace.