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'He can burn, he can die': Disgrace's Figuration of a Figureless Nation
- The Cambridge Quarterly
- Oxford University Press
- Volume 46, Number 2, June 2017
- pp. 162-182
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Though Disgrace is commonly thought to lack the allegorical aspects that appear in some of Coetzee's earlier fictions, the novel in fact employs an extended trope that represents the post-Apartheid South Africa that David Lurie encounters as a nation where figuration itself has been largely proscribed and only literal language is deemed legitimate. Lurie's involuntary re-education amidst a linguistic landscape devoid of metaphor is both a way of divesting him of his racial, gender, and species privilege, and a method of depicting allegorically the experience of being rendered superfluous by the forces of historical change.