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ABSTRACT
Contrasting the historical injuries of apartheid politics with contemporary violence in postapartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace explores how competing past and present claims of victimization may be reconciled. While critics generally remark on the inability of existing legal frameworks to adequately address the way in which experience is shaped by identity, few have remarked on the temporal dimension of postapartheid South African social relations. This essay considers the way in which temporality modifies and undermines the role of identity claims in contemporary frameworks of justice. It argues that historical injury must be understood not as belonging to identity but as mediated by the temporality of embodied experience. By recognizing historical injury not as static object but as lived affective orientation toward the present, this essay suggests we might create a productive opening for rethinking existing social justice paradigms.
Notes
1. See, for instance, Andrews, Altman.
2. For readings of Disgrace as a response to the TRC, see Jacqueline Rose, “Apathy and Accountability: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission”; Rebecca Saunders, “Disgrace in the Time of a Truth Commission.”
3. See, for instance, Poyner, Krog.
4. Others, such as Gareth Cornwell, have rejected Marais’s claim as “nonsense,” arguing that, unlike in the attack on Lucy, “[t]here is no evidence that Lurie’s dalliance with Melanie Isaacs has permanently damaged her” (319). Cornwell elaborates in a footnote that what distinguishes the two instances of sexual violence is that Melanie never fears the threat of death. Cornwell argues that “[t]he difference is summed up succinctly in Lurie’s thoughts on Byron’s many conquests, some of which, he surmises, amounted to little more than rape: ‘But none surely had cause to fear that the session would end with her throat being cut’” (321).
5. In framing his actions in the timeless and apolitical terms of “love,” Lurie casts himself in terms similar to what Elizabeth Povinelli has termed the “autological subject” whose “love,” far from being bound by the constraints of the “genealogical society,” has the capacity to “change history” (178). The autological subject is closely tied to the constructs of white Western subjectivity in its commitment to a “liberal mode of self-abstraction and social unity. For these people, the intimate event is not merely a substantive good in and of itself; it opposes all other modes of organizing intimacy. In this Manichean universe, those multitudinous others who don’t organize their intimacies on the basis of socially exfoliating love, but on the basis of lust, tribalism, race, kinship, or religion, do not have true love. Love can accidentally happen in these other kinds of socialities—it can happen in spite of their constraints on and distortions of the subject. But true love works against the social as a set of constraining surfaces” (177).
6. See Elizabeth Anker’s “Human Rights, Social Justice, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace” for an analysis of the way the novel negotiates contradictory meanings of “desire.”
7. Michael Rothberg has argued that, in fact, the comparison of disparate instances of injury across historical moments can offer productive new perspectives. Understanding the plurality of memories of victimization as productive sites of exchange, Rothberg has suggested that “multidirectionality” provides a model for thinking about the way in which narratives of historical memory can be mutually transformative. In a multidirectional framework, rather than figuring memory as necessarily competitive—so that the memory of one event is understood to detract from or impede the memory of another—a multidirectional approach would instead allow for a more nuanced understanding of each. While multidirectional comparison can offer a productive lens for understanding large political structures, the model’s broad application risks abstracting a more nuanced account of the experience of injury. Specifically, in the case of the TRC trials, these practices of comparison have come under attack for minimizing the very experiences that have made apartheid unique.
8. Critiques of the novel have emphasized the way in which Coetzee relies on a stereotype of black masculinity, describing the rapists as men who “do rape” (Disgrace 158). See, for instance, McDonald for an overview of the reception of Disgrace in South Africa, and in particular the African National Committee’s (ANC) claims that the novel confirms the continued prevalence of white racism in the South African media. And, indeed, Lurie does not do much to dispel the notion that he himself uncritically relies on such tropes.
9. Jasbir Puar has described the problematic temporal stability of identity on which the intersectional model relies: “[i]ntersectionality demands the knowing, naming, and thus stabilizing of identity across space and time, relying on the logic of equivalence and analogy between various axes of identity and generating narratives of progress that deny the fictive and performative aspects of identification: you become an identity, yes, but also timelessness works to consolidate the fiction of a seamless stable identity in every space” (Puar 212). Critical for Puar is the fact that intersectional identity appears fixed, that is, identity categories are understood as essentially equivalent regardless of their social and historical contexts. Despite its ambitions, intersectionality, then, captures identity as a complicated—but ultimately stable—“freeze-frame.”
10. For Lurie, a “disciple of […] Wordsworth” (Disgrace 116), this idea seems to echo Wordsworth’s experience at Tintern Abbey where past and present experience seem to overlap in the same moment. Yet, in addition to the filmic effects, the act of watching the film for Lurie appears to reflect this doubling of past and present on yet another level. Like Wordsworth remembering his first visit to Tintern Abbey, Lurie, too, watching the film with Melanie, is suddenly reminded of the first time he saw it “a quarter century ago.” For Wordsworth, of course, experience of the past returning in the present is an opportunity to reflect on the change of the self in the course of time, and the video recording appears to have a similar effect on Lurie.
11. Massumi argues that this movement is crucial to understanding lived reality. In the “positional model” (Massumi’s term for intersectional approaches to identity), Massumi observes that “[t]here is ‘displacement,’ but no transformation; it is as if the body simply leaps from one definition to the next” (3). Because the “positional model’s definitional framework is punctual, it simply can’t attribute a reality to the interval whose crossing is a continuity (or nothing). The space of the crossing, the gaps between positions on the grid, falls into a theoretical no-body’s land” (3–4).
12. Sara Ahmed has articulated how we might understand the materiality of lived experience not only as subject position but as orientation. Orientation, as direction, emphasizes precisely the movement between subject and object in which both mutually give rise to the other. The past functions as a way of providing a direction that affects bodies in different ways. Ahmed, speaking specifically to the way that colonial past belongs to the racialized body, writes: “bodies are shaped by histories of colonialism […] Bodies remember such histories, even when we forget them. Such histories, we might say, surface on the body, or even shape how bodies surface […] In a way, then, race does become a social as well as a bodily given, or what we receive from others as an inheritance of this history” (111). Importantly, Ahmed speaks of race not as identity category or subject position but rather as bodies that share a similar orientation. Orientation, while acknowledging the materiality of race, understands it as a dynamic (rather than stable) embodied reality. In this way, even though orientation appears as a given directionality of movement, it is never coextensive with identity; movement always exceeds such boundedness.
13. Jane Poyner, for instance, has argued that, for Lucy “in this symbolic sense, rape signifies a great leveler of racial injustice” (“Truth and Reconciliation” 72).
14. “Against a background of the traditional gendered binary of oppressor and oppressed,” Boehmer writes, “[h]ow […] can we speak of atonement if it entails that women as ever assume the generic pose of suffering in silence” (Boehmer 146).
15. Alexander G. Weheliye has described such an understanding of community as “forms of human emancipation that can be imagined but not (yet) described” (127).
16. Derek Attridge has argued that literary fiction occupies a unique position in that it can accommodate indeterminacy without reducing singularity to frameworks of the already known (Singularity).
17. Though Lurie’s act of sympathetic identification may at times seem to approximate a shared affective orientation, true alterity ultimately remains inaccessible to him. Lurie’s identification with the dogs in Bev’s clinic, and particularly his devotion to the corpses of the dogs that have been put to death there, provides the limit case for the possibility of such identification. See Attrige “Age.”
18. Jacqueline Rose, for instance, has stressed identification as necessary response to historic injustice.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Stefanie Boese
Stefanie Boese received her PhD in English at the University of Illinois in Chicago and currently teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. She is working on a book project that explores historical injury in contemporary fiction.