The protagonist of Disgrace (1999), literature professor David Lurie, is a man against time. He refuses to debase himself before the politically correct dictates of his university when his affair with a student becomes public. When pressed for comment by the media, he goes so far as to say that the relationship was “enriching,” which is an elegant if shocking statement. He refuses to apologize, though he readily confesses his guilt “in a legal sense.”  A more fawning apology would have meant that he could have kept his position.  All he had to do was to consent to a statement written for him. Yet our anti-hero refuses, and instead elects to abscond to his daughter’s farm estate.  

Is he a “disgrace”? It seems the very opposite. Rather, he faces his challenges stoically and as a man. He is a man with few needs, though he sees the world in a rich tapestry of words.  Sex with a prostitute once a week left him more than content, before the prostitute unfortunately ended her services. Then the affair with his student Melanie reignited his passion and his zest for life, but it ended his academic career. Nevertheless, Lurie refuses to atone, to make a teary-eyed confession of his sins for the mob outraged by his affair. 

And so Lurie retreats to live with his daughter Lucy on her formerly hippie commune farm. He agrees to help her on the farm, but only on the following terms: 

“But only as long as I don’t have to become a better person. I am not prepared to be reformed. I want to go on being myself. I’ll do it on that basis” (77). 

Living with his daughter Lucy and her associates in the animal welfare organization such as Bev Shaw, Lurie takes on an ironic attitude in their interactions.  After all, someone of his education in literature is ill-suited to these environs, yet he placidly accepts his fate. His conception of the matter is that he was “a servant of Eros.”  This is the story he tells himself to make sense of his situation. Therefore, he really has nothing to apologize for. And all the censure against him was really a matter of people being after his symbolic castration, which is later symbolized in the dogs he helps care for when he stays with his daughter. 

When their home is invaded, burglarized, and the father and daughter are brutalized respectively, it tends to put Lurie’s small transgression in perspective. There are affairs which liberal White women find offensive, and then there is crime on the level one finds in South Africa, which goes unpunished and unavenged. Race is merely the subtext in all this. 

They can hardly bother to go to the police; again, the implication is that White South Africans won’t find much sympathy there, regardless of their victimization. So we don’t get much of a physical description of the robbers, but we know who they were, and we assume there will be no justice. The only question is how Lucy was naive enough to lock up her dogs after the three men approached the house, seeing as that this would be the whole purpose of having the dogs in the first place. 

Disgrace shows a nuanced take on race relations in South Africa post-apartheid. On one hand, Lucy’s home is ransacked, she is raped, and Lurie is set on fire by blacks, yet it’s not as though Lurie then harbors ill-will towards black people in general. Rather, he simply acknowledges that the relationship between blacks and whites has changed in South Africa.  Lurie wonders to himself if their black neighbor and hired hand Petrus might have been somehow involved in the home invasion, but realizes that he isn’t really in a position to press the issue, as in “the old days” he would have been able to:  

“It is a new world they live in, he and Lucy and Petrus. Petrus knows it, and he knows it, and Petrus knows that he knows it” (117)  

Petrus is a vivid depiction of an African: friendly, hardworking, but also inscrutable and unscrupulous. He seems to want to get along with Lucy and David, yet he also seems to be complicit in their home invasion. From the quite reasonable perspective of David, Petrus can’t have it both ways. 

Lucy, meanwhile, is such the guilty white liberal that she refuses to call the police even when the assailants appear at a party at Petrus’.  David chides her: 

“You want to make up for the wrongs of the past, but this is not the way to do it” (133). 

This could be like an epitaph for liberals. Amazingly, this is not the worst decision that Lucy will make.  

David Lurie develops a fondness for a couple sheep who are due to be the meal for Petrus’ party; the sheep symbolize White South Africans who are likewise being made ready for the slaughter, as he and Lucy are sitting in their farmhouse, waiting to be invaded again. 

Because the country does not really want Whites to own farm land, they are in an uphill battle to get justice and to maintain this lifestyle.  For a moment, it seems the police will help, but it is a false alarm. 

There are some who have said that Disgrace is similar to Albert Camus’ The Stranger, due to the existentialist vibe of the novel.  Lurie does have an existentialist approach to life insofar as he tends to create the meaning that he decides is important rather than adhere to an objective set of standards imposed by society.  For me, this is best demonstrated when he is asked by the media about what he took away from the experience having a scandalous affair with a student, to which he replies that it was “enriching.”  Later, however, when Lurie visits Isaacs, Melanie’s father, he strikes a more contrite tone (why one couldn’t say).  

When Lurie returns to Cape Town, where he taught as an English professor, he experiences true ostracism. Most his former colleagues pretend not to know him and turn their backs.  He even hints to Lucy that he might move back in with her, but she doesn’t take the hint, or at least she decides not to take the hint. 

The novel ends with Lurie quite low, and his daughter even lower. Their downfall is parallel to the fate of Whites in South Africa, truly a disgrace. 

Theme? 

As The Guardian puts it, Disgrace “grapples with savage complexity of the apartheid and post-apartheid years.”  But it really isn’t that complex–Whites are now being persecuted just as surely as blacks were previously discriminated against, only perhaps now the violence has escalated, which is produced with fidelity in Disgrace. As The Guardian puts it, everyone in Disgrace seems to be a victim. That is a fair interpretation of the novel, given that it more or less characterizes Lurie’s attitude towards South Africa. But then again, one can’t help but notice that one people in particular are victimized now. 

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