The interconnectedness of all things, which is at the heart of eco-critical awareness, holds that the life of the earth and the life of the mind are one and the same. J M Coetzee's Disgrace, which is set against the backdrop of apartheid and the dispensation of the old order in South Africa, is situated in this holistic awareness. This novel is a tragedy of hubris. At the center of the novel is David Lurie, a professor of literature, who disgraces himself by an act of seduction involving his student, Melanie Isaacs. Lurie is compelled to leave the university because he declines to repent. He pleads guilty but refuses to repent because he believes that repentance belongs to another world, another world of discourse. Seeking escape from his sterile and meaningless existence in Cape Town, Lurie tries to take refuge in his daughter Lucy's small holding in the dusty South. Lucy lives close to nature, and believes that there is no higher life. She is raped by three black men. Lurie, witness to this act of disgrace, is broken both physically and emotionally. Lucy, however, does not press the charges of rape or even report the fact of her violation. She accepts the bastard foetus and the protection of the complicit black neighbor. Lucy's staying on in the farm is an act of endurance, which is required to heal the old scars of racial hatred. Lurie, is thrown into a wilderness, which forces him to explore what it means to be human and what it is not to be human. As Lurie's self-absorbed and sheltered world collapses, he steps into a greater reality of living totally in the present moment in the ravaged hinterlands of South Africa. This novel situates the understanding of the hubristic act of tragedy in the natural world where the protagonist achieves a Zen-like clarity of mind observing the gentle sun, the stillness of mid afternoon and bees busy in a field of flower.
The
way we construct and ideate the natural world is as important a terrain as the
land itself. The interconnectedness of all things, which is at the heart of eco-critical
awareness, holds that the life on the earth and the life of the mind are one and
the same. As Kent Ryden points out, “To fully understand this aspect of experience—the
daily, inevitable, deeply shaping relationship among people, the earth, and the
life that the earth supports, it demands that we be folklorists, geographers,
historians, landscape readers, students of material culture.” In adopting
an interdisciplinary approach, the eco-critical scholar reconstitutes literature
in the grounded circumstances of life, thought and action. This paper interprets
J M Coetzee’s Booker winning novel, Disgrace (1999), which is set against
the backdrop of apartheid and the dispensation of the old order in South Africa,
from this holistic perspective. |
