Rape as Debt: The Incineration of Romanticism in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

The action of Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee's academic novel about the professional and personal fall of an English professor, highlights, literally and figuratively, the incineration of Romanticism. In the novel, aging Byronic lothario and (in post-apartheid South Africa) former Romantics scholar David Lurie, now reclassified as a "Communications" professor, has an affair with one of his students, Melanie Isaacs, a young woman who fancies herself an actress. Doomed from the start, the relationship quickly becomes troubled, but Lurie forces continuation of the relationship while at the same time demanding that Melanie do the same coursework everyone else is doing. Incredulous at his double standard, demanding a forced intimacy from her, even as he expects her to continue to be just another student in his class who follows the rules in order to hide their relationship, she soon accuses him of sexual misconduct, and he is terminated after a required hearing.

A devotee of Wordsworth's poetry and poetics, Lurie lectures on the Poet Laureate's work to groups of apathetic students, who have never seen "Nature" as the poet experiences and recreates it (or even as the professor remembers it). During one class lecture, attended somewhat reluctantly by his student lover, Lurie cites Wordsworth's famous Mont Blanc passage from The Prelude, in which Wordsworth "grieves" to have a "soulless image" appear on the eye, in the bright clarity of sunshine that "had usurped upon living thought / That never more could be" (6.551-55). Lurie invites the students to see that "usurp upon" does not mean "take over entirely" but rather "intrude" or "encroach upon" (21). Naked, stark reality thus intrudes upon the purity of thought and by such intrusion damages it. The issue, Lurie suggests, is whether the purity of imagination can ever truly co-exist with the mundane. In terms of the sublime, Lurie is questioning whether or not the mind can actively support the transport of the imagination, even as the real world overtakes and populates the mind with sense perceptions. Lurie begins to suspect, in this lecture, that there are circumscribed limits to what we can discern about the Romantic sublime or even about the applicability of Romantic notions in daily life. Rather, real life "usurps upon" the imaginative one and ultimately displaces it. At this point, to use Melinda Harvey's phrase, Lurie the Romantic begins to be "re-educate[d]" (104), but this re-education does not finally result in any form of reconciliation, grace, or transformative wisdom.¹

After his termination from the University, Lurie retreats to the country, "usurping upon" the domain of his daughter, who, appropriately enough, is named Lucy, a double pun because she reminds us not only of the Luciferian fall that Wordsworth recounts in Book 1 of The Prelude, but also of Wordsworth's Lucy poems, which hang spectrally throughout Coetzee's narrative. Like Wordsworth's unnamed interlocutor, Lurie's daughter Lucy, however earthy, is mysterious, passionately obstinate, and often inscrutable. Prior to his disgrace, Lurie's experience of "Nature" had been primarily intellectual, mediated by his readings of Romantic poetry. But, in the country he encounters "real" Nature for the first time. He assists with chores on Lucy's farm, and he volunteers for a pet service that cremates unwanted animals. He also darkly encounters the black/white politics of a post-apartheid nation, in which black farmers recolonize lands once held by Europeans. In response, Lurie rejects the Wordsworthian sublime, embracing for a time the exilic status of Lord Byron and imagining an opera in which Byron and Teresa Guiccioli play out their semi-tragic love. But this imagined artifact is yet another abstraction, for, in the end, Lurie must experience only "reality." He endures the brutality of his own daughter's rape by relatives of Petrus, her black neighbor and farmer of rising importance, his own beating at the hands of the rapists, the ongoing incineration of dogs' corpses from the clinic, and the nagging memory of a life and career based on ideas that he now fears are outmoded, outdated, and irrelevant. The...