13 thoughts on “Disgrace

  1. Siau Rui Goh

    Rex – I really enjoyed your presentation. I think you uncovered some really interesting things about Coetzee – his aversion to giving speeches and ‘writer-ly’ things (readings and talks), his views on the ‘white writer voice’ and his attempt to disrupt comparisons of him and his characters. I also like that you showed us those two video clips – I found it extremely effective. A lingering question I had – and I know it’s something you probably can’t answer unless you’ve somehow read all his works – was how ‘Disgrace’ fit into his body of works that included, as you mentioned, books that dealt with South African politics and animal rights. I would also have liked to hear your thoughts on why this work of his won the Booker Prize.

    Emily – I thought your presentation was great. It was comprehensive and you did a great job of organizing all the different elements in the novel in a very coherent way.

    On a separate note, I was particularly intrigued by the notion of Lurie using women that Jae brought up. There’s another passage, near the end when he thinks about all the women he has known, that supports this: ‘By Melanie, by the girl in Touws River; by Rosalind, Bev Shaw, Soraya: by each of them he was enriched, and by the others too, even the least of them, even the failures. Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness’ (192). While Lurie is grateful, I found this sense of him using (and discarding?) women problematic because it made me think of an earlier passage describing sheep: ‘Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry’ (123).

    While Coetzee parallels animals and humans throughout, I don’t think he ever equates them. In fact, Lurie suggests that human beings are of ‘higher order’ – though, of course, he doesn’t behave accordingly, succumbing to his desires and treating women as though they aren’t part of that order. So while it’s great that he starts to sympathize more with animals and women, when it comes to women, he’s still relating them back to him and thus relegating them to the background. You get this sense during Lucy’s outburst, when she insists on keeping the baby: ‘I can’t run my life according to whether or not you like what I do. Not any more. You behave as if everything I do is part of the story of your life. You are the main character. I am a minor character who doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through…[but] I am not minor. I have a life of my own, just as important to me as yours is to you, and in my life I am the one who makes the decisions’ (198).

    It’s in this light that I think that what Lucy does (even if it’s a troubling compromise) shouldn’t be dismissed as her simply renouncing her agency. As Emily mentioned, there’s deliberation and, I think, a strong sense of ownership – at least vis-a-vis her father – that gives her some agency.

  2. Catherine Alexandre

    Rex: I especially appreciated the way that you drew parallels between Byron’s life and the choices that David makes in the novel. That shed a thought-provoking light on the motives behind decisions that he makes, such as why David seems to almost want to be kicked out of his position at the university, in a way that never would have occurred to me otherwise. I also found your point about his focus on post-apartheid themes and power structures in his earlier works useful. Coetzee in this novel expands beyond power structures of race to those of gender and animals as well. The fact that Coetzee chooses not to portray the rape scenes in this novel reminds me of J.G. Farrell’s decision not to include the voice of the natives in “Siege of Krishnapur” because it seems to me that not only does he not want to allow for any sort of “titillation” as Professor Billings pointed out, but I think Coetzee also recognizes that he, like David, as a male, cannot know or fully understand the experience from a woman’s perspective.

    Emily: I thought you brought up a lot of moments and themes that allowed for a conversation of the text on a lot of different levels. The question of David’s growth as a person is one that I am still grappling with because I think that right until the last moments of the novel he remains more or less the same, until he finally acknowledges how healthy Lucy looks (218) which I believe is his recognition of her strength and his respect for her decision, even if it is not what he wanted or even a choice that he is fully capable of understanding. This moment, combined with his letting go of the dog at the end clearly signify that he has grown, especially in his relationship with his daughter, but the way that I read the text gives no indication that that is true of his relationship with all women, and that he comes to respect the women that he has been romantically involved with in any way other than centered around what he got out of it. I wrote this post before reading Siau Rui’s comments and can’t help but laugh because I drew on the same quote and could not agree with her more in her conclusions. As she points out, while watching Melanie dance (192) David asks himself, “What has happened to them, all those women, all those lives?…Enriched: that was the word the newspapers picked on to jeer at. A stupid word to let slip, under the circumstances, yet now, at this moment, he would stand by it…by each of them he was enriched, and by the others too, even the least of them, even the failures.” While he stops to consider what role they have had in his life, he never really wonders what affects his actions have had on those women. Furthermore, I think what really defines David’s lack of substantial growth lies in the question you asked at the beginning of your presentation: “The question is, what lesson have we learned? The question is, what are we going to do now that we are sorry” (172)? I believe that while David comes to understand himself, he is yet to reach the point at which he can take whatever awareness he has gained and “do” something.

  3. Phoebe Shang

    Emily mentioned David Loury’s play with tenses and his use of perfectives. He explains to his students the difference between burned and burnt, drink and drink up, noting that the second terms are more final. He uses the phrase “burnt, burnt up” twice—the first time in reference to his hair loss and raw scalp (perhaps ironically a sign of aging) and the second time in anticipation of “giving up” his favorite dog to the flames. To me, this image of sacrifice and perhaps purification through flame, signals his recognition of inevitable decline in potential, youth and dignity. At the end of the novel, he has yet to give up his favorite dog but he foresees a time when the dog will already have been “burnt, burnt up,” in the past and irretrievable. To me, this novel is partly about the redistribution of power and dignity. David takes dignity away from Melanie, even though he frames it as “distributing beauty.” Petrus starts out as the “dog man” but as the book goes on, he becomes a man, while Lucy who is raped by the men she terms “tax-collectors” becomes a dog. David, who is violated through his daughter and made to feel old by her independence from him, becomes dog-like because of his apparent uselessness. He, like the dogs, is waiting to enter the room where souls expire. Lucy, in passively giving up her land to Petrus and her body to bear the child, seems to be making a concession to ease the black/ white tension. A certain redemption/ creative force resides in her child, especially since it will blur the line between black and white. Lucy insists that she will love the child, but Loury frames the child more as a product of hate than love. Thus, even this potential of redemption seems doubtful.

    I think that David Loury did take unfair advantage of Melanie. His encounter with her as with the roadside prostitute was despicable because neither woman was fully mentally or physically capable of making the best decision for themselves (being both young and/or high/drunk). I do sympathize with his feelings of being outmoded, however. His poetry distances Melanie and his references to Byron make him seem effete to readers. He says that even when he burns he doesn’t sing. He isn’t lyrical. This seems reflected in his never-completed opera. His inability to produce creative work makes him feel emasculated in a way. Lucy also points out that in the eyes of the black men, he doesn’t count as much of a protective figure or threat. As he himself pointed out, his knowledge of diverse languages doesn’t do him much good in Lucy’s situation. He left academia in order not to reject himself/ his instincts (like his neighbor’s dog who cowers whenever a female dog passes by). But when he does actually venture into the countryside, he realizes that he isn’t raw or instinctual or practical enough to deal with the politics there.

  4. Amy Prescott

    Rex: I thought it was great to learn more about Coetzee and a few of his other novels, and I hadn’t noticed the animal rights messages present in Disgrace until you touched on the author’s concern for the matter. Watching the clips from the Nobel Prize banquet and lecture made me want to read more of the author’s work, particularly Foe.

    Emily: I’m glad you pointed out how self-centered David acts and how this relates to his “idea world” that sets him apart from the physical world, which he really first starts to understand a bit better after spending time at Lucy’s. This was good springboard for starting the discussion that probably could have kept going for another several hours after class let out.

    Coetzee’s use of German words and phrases at a few parts in the novel struck me as a bit strange but was something no one brought up during our class discussion. In describing the process of putting dogs to sleep, the term “Lösung”, meaning “solution”, is used as “an appropriately blank abstraction…”, a “sublimation” (142) that makes the animals disappear fully from both their owners’ lives and the physical world as a whole. Coetzee plays with the word choice here; like “solution” in English, the German “Lösung” can mean both an answer to a problem as well as a homogenous chemical mixture where multiple components are no longer distinguishable. For the owners, giving up the sick or unwanted dogs to be killed is a solution of the first definition, while the process of euthanasia and incineration fits abstractly with the second definition, where the ashes of the dogs end up mixed with everything else in the incinerator and, if one chooses to believe, any spiritual remnants get absorbed into some ether of the afterlife.

    Another interesting use of German ties back to what Francie wrote about David realizing Lucy’s healthy appearance and coming to possibly respect her lifestyle choice. He describes her as “…a young woman, das ewig Weibliche, lightly pregnant”, with the German meaning “the eternally feminine” (218). Upon my initial reading, I thought this was just meant to refer to how Lucy fit some sort of pastoral image of an obviously fertile woman tending to similarly fertile fields, but it’s part of the last line of Goethe’s Faust: “The eternal feminine draws us upward.” David’s knowledge of poetry brings this image to his mind, and it seems to indicate a personal concession that women do exert some sort of power, probably related in his case to their ability to intoxicate men with feelings of desire.

    Going away from the analytical, I have to admit that the topic of coerced, unwanted sex made this novel extremely difficult for me to stomach both in my own reading of it and our class discussion. I found it nearly impossible to consider the literary aspects of a situation and set of behaviors I can’t see as anything but repulsive. At the start of class today, I had trouble understanding why the book had won so many awards, but I’ve never felt quite so physically ill after reading and talking about just over 200 pages of text. Coetzee’s novel has the power to evoke strong reactions, and this likely made it stand out to the judges reading it.

  5. Georgia Wright-Simmons

    Ah so many things you could conceivably respond to from this day! I’ll begin with Rex. I’m sorry upfront, I do not have too much to say about Coetzee himself, but more about the brief bit about Byron and Lurey. Specifically, I feel that Lurey embodies a very specific kind of author. He claims, at one point, that he “never aspired to teach people how to live. I was what used to be called a scholar. I wrote books about dead people. That was where my heart was. I taught only to make a living” (162). He tells us here his relationship with the world. He loves the romantic world of literature and dead authors. He lives in this world primarily. He only goes through the motions of living in his own world, and even then he works to turn his world into the world he wants it to be–the world of dead authors. I was intrigued when we touched on the way that he wants his life to BE Byron’s. He wants an illicit affair, for which he will be romantically exiled to live out his days in exclusion. Or something along those lines. Theoretically, this sounds beautiful, romantic, historical. It is the life he wants. His idea of how the world works comes from works and biographies, not from what he has observed. We see, then, that the world as it works in reality is far removed from the world of the stories we have been told (and that we tell ourselves). Illicit affairs are not romantic, but wreck one girl’s life, and turn Lurey into a creepy, old man rather than a man of preternatural youth of soul for his age, who has swept a poor unsuspecting girl off her feet and showed her the transcendental experience of love. The exile is not romantic and peaceful–Lurey deigning to try the “simple” life of his daughter–but instead is wrought with conflict and misery. When the author attempts to live out his great fictions, the world does not respond with applause but with disdain.

    For Emily, I’d like to sort of continue the above thought, but on a different note. Essentially, I want to go back to the point that Lurey acknowledges the real world exists, but what he really wants is to connect it with his intellectual reality, or only live in his intellectual reality. This makes him view the actual world as only a “sense-experience,” and he does not react with the vehemence we would expect, and it actually stunts him completely as a human being. In this case (as with Midnight’s Children), I think it is interesting to turn to Psychology briefly. Piaget, who focused on children’s development, came up with stages of moral development, too. A man named Kohlberg elaborated on it, and essentially there are three major stages. The pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional. It moves from pre-conventional, where morality is simply an attempt to avoid getting in trouble, to post-conventional, where the individual has fully internalized morality and has moved to the level where they are so well versed in it that they can contemplate complex moral issues from their own perspective–for example, these people would deeply consider the issues of say stealing medicine to save a man to whom the hospital was not offering enough help, etc. They know that society is not always right and that they must think for themselves, but they think with a very moral framework. When Lurey meets with Melanie’s father, it seems to me, Melanie’s father is pointing out that Lurey has never moved beyond the first stage, which is obedience, punishment, and self-interest driven. For all Lurey’s great intellectualism in the realm of literature, he has a very childish and simple understanding of human morality in the world he actually lives in.

  6. Ty Carleton

    Rex: I was glad you showed us the videos of Coetzee speaking. No matter how one feels about the ‘intentional fallacy’, it is always fun to think about the man or woman behind the words. This is especially true for contemporary writers whom can often be assumed to write in conversation an identifiable set of political/social views. I could see where the somber and solemn tone of Disgrace came from. That man is painful to listen to.

    I’m also glad that you brought in the piece about Byron. That is definitely a key theme in the novel and it was nice to receive some historical background.

    Emily: This was clearly a very difficult novel to present on because it contains so many themes and facets and challenging ideas and I thought you did a great job of adhering to a cohesive string of logic.

    I still feel very strongly that trying to analyze Lurie’s character is a much more difficult task than one might assume after a first reading. This is essentially a man who yearns to be yearned for. “One moment stands out in recollection, when she hooks a leg behind his buttocks to draw him in closer: as the tendon of her inner thigh tightens against him, he feels a surge of joy and desire” (29). One of the components of his character arc lies in his acceptance of the fact that this longing will never be reciprocated; he reconciles his affiliation with Teresa, the abandoned lover.

    This is the story of a man who willingly allows the small security and meaning his life has acquired to slip languidly through his fingers. Like with Mersault in The Stranger, there is no apparent explanation for Lurie’s lack of calculated judgment. This requires the reader to approach Lurie’s motivations outside of the typical framework of character analysis. His life has amounted to two divorces, an estranged daughter, a few unread books and a job he doesn’t care about. Lurie’s existentialist apathy is both the cause of the lack of substance in his life and a symptom of it. This is the story of a downward spiral; a man caught in the dialectic trap of disgrace. He is not bound to God like Mr. Isaacs, to the land like Lucy and initially he is not bound to the care of animals like Bev Shaw. Disgrace is an exploration of a man who has nothing to live for. He tries to relive the joys of fatherhood but faces resistance and rejection from Lucy. Eventually he settles upon the transient affection of dogs meant for the incinerator as a last vestige of care in his life.

    I don’t think one can conclusively claim that Lurie is malicious. He is a blunt man who refuses to reify the societal structures that have deemed his life a failure. He is a father with no child. He’s a sad man who doesn’t believe in sadness.

  7. Meaghan Flood

    Rex-
    I thought that focusing your presentation on the question of authorship was a great move. It is interesting that Coetzee makes such an effort (although he seems effortless in doing so) to distance himself from his published writing, and yet his work seems to beg for a biographical reading. I think it’s fair to say that our interpretation of the animal scenes and human-animal relationships in the novel might have taken a different direction if we did not know that Coetzee is very much invested in the animal rights movement. I had to chuckle when he launched into a reading of the creative work he authored immediately after he dismissed Daniel DeFoe as an author. I think you phrased it perfectly when you called what he is doing “complicating the discussion.”

    Emily-
    I think you did a great job of bringing our attention to a lot of important moments in the novel. I was really interested in your analysis of the moment in his lecture on Wordsworth when Lurie says, “Yet we cannot live our daily lives in a realm of pure ideas, cocooned from sense-experience. The question is not, How can we keep the imagination pure, protected from the onslaughts of reality? The question has to be, Can we find a way for the two to coexist?” (22). This passage, to me, is central to understanding Lurie’s character. The focalization of the narrative provides ample evidence that Lurie’s mind is super-saturated with ideas and intellectual musings. Lurie’s sexcapades seem to suggest that he is balancing (or even overcompensating for) his intellect with (to use Emily’s word) the antidote of sense-experience. And yet, he still intellectualizes his sense-experiences: his first encounter with Melanie is aborted when he quotes Shakespeare (16); after they sleep together for the first time, he says, “After the storm, he thinks: straight out of George Grosz”; he describes their affair in classical terms, saying, “Strange love! Yet from the quiver of Aphrodite, goddess of the foaming waves, no doubt about that”; and as Rex pointed out, the entire affair is likely no more than a means to his Byronic end. I think the argument can be made that Lurie engages in sense-experiences not as the solution to his problematic intellect, but does so as a performance of that solution. Similarly, his apology is the performance of an apology. His initial attempts at connecting with Lucy are performances of fatherhood. It is because of Lurie’s self-centered performances that we condemn him, and it is because he ultimately does something so un-performative that we see hope for his transformation.

  8. Meaghan Flood

    Rex-
    I thought that focusing your presentation on the question of authorship was a great move. It is interesting that Coetzee makes such an effort (although he seems effortless in doing so) to distance himself from his published writing, and yet his work seems to beg for a biographical reading. I think it’s fair to say that our interpretation of the animal scenes and human-animal relationships in the novel might have taken a different direction if we did not know that Coetzee is very much invested in the animal rights movement. I had to chuckle when he launched into a reading of the creative work he authored immediately after he dismissed Daniel DeFoe as an author. I think you phrased it perfectly when you called what he is doing “complicating the discussion.”

    Emily-
    I think you did a great job of bringing our attention to a lot of important moments in the novel. I was really interested in your analysis of the moment in his lecture on Wordsworth when Lurie says, “Yet we cannot live our daily lives in a realm of pure ideas, cocooned from sense-experience. The question is not, How can we keep the imagination pure, protected from the onslaughts of reality? The question has to be, Can we find a way for the two to coexist?” (22). This passage, to me, is central to understanding Lurie’s character. The focalization of the narrative provides ample evidence that Lurie’s mind is super-saturated with ideas and intellectual musings. Lurie’s sexcapades seem to suggest that he is balancing (or even overcompensating for) his intellect with (to use Emily’s word) the antidote of sense-experience. And yet, he still intellectualizes his sense-experiences: his first encounter with Melanie is aborted when he quotes Shakespeare (16); after they sleep together for the first time, he says, “After the storm, he thinks: straight out of George Grosz”; he describes their affair in classical terms, saying, “Strange love! Yet from the quiver of Aphrodite, goddess of the foaming waves, no doubt about that”; and as Rex pointed out, the entire affair is likely no more than a means to his Byronic end. I think the argument can be made that Lurie engages in sense-experiences not as the solution to his problematic intellect, but does so as a performance of that solution. Similarly, his apology is the performance of an apology. His initial attempts at connecting with Lucy are performances of fatherhood. It is because of Lurie’s self-centered performances that we condemn him, and because of the potential he ultimately shows to do something utterly un-performative that we see the potential for his transformation.

  9. Jae woo Lee

    Rex’s presentation on Coetzee helped me appreciate his work even more. I found it very interesting how Coetzee perceives authorship and uses the reader’s expectation to create different readings of his works. It might be a stretch, but this made me think of Lurie’s relationship with his own work. Lourie begins his opera but realizes that he will never publish it midway. His opera remains a perfectly private business, with no chance of his work taking on its own meaning independent from the writer.

    Emily made a lot of great points about Lourie’s failure to understand reality, caught up in an “intellectual bubble.” On a similar note to Georgia’s comment on Lurie as a scholar, I found it interesting that he is keen to observe the hierarchy in other families such as Isaacs and Petrus’ but fails to see his relationship with Melanie in the context of power relationship. I know we briefly talked about this in class, but Lourie’s observation when he visits Isaacs’ house really struck me as a concrete examples of Lourie’s inability to see his reeflection in Isaac and Petrus. Perhaps this is a sign of him growing up in that he learns to understand underlying power relationships between people, but I thought it demonstrated his distance from reality and how he creates his own reality like he creates his characters in his opera.
    Lourie’s uneasiness with Petrus also interested me, especially when he observes
    Petrus’ new socioeconomic status as a sort of a personal threat. I feel like the conflict with the new racial power dynamics weaves into Lourie’s struggle against his anonymous assailants, drawing parallel with Lucy’s rape that remains unspoken.

  10. Hallie Woods

    Sorry to be slow on the uptake, many thoughts to formulate and they needed a day to stew!

    Rex – I was most struck during your presentation when you said that Coetzee does indeed have a moral code, we just aren’t privy to what that may be. This idea that he doesn’t want the reader to know much about him, or to behave the way a typical author would is an interesting one, and something I’m sure would be worth pursuing further. It took me until the presentation to realize that this moral code of his is coming out through his work with the dogs especially, and how that certainly can be seen as a very strong animal rights message. The connections you made to Byron were also quite cool, and again, I think Coetzee having David replicate the life of an author is an interesting choice that serves to alienate him from his reader, while at the same time still engaging their curiosity about him.
    On a side note, did you see this article? http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/university-of-texas-acquires-coetzees-papers/

    Emily – There was so much in your presentation worth talking about that I hardly know where to begin. I appreciated you making clear just how self centered David’s entire existence is, and how the novel works to separate his two worlds, both literally and figuratively. I remember while reading noticing that Coetzee still hadn’t given us his name, and so I am glad you touched upon that and connected it to David just being ridiculously self absorbed.
    There was the unseen rape discussion, which I found in particular to be the most compelling. In having David as a character flounder with not having been there, the reader also must occupy that same difficult state. We as readers automatically assume that we know more than David, that we would have understood Lucy and can imagine in our own minds the horror that she underwent, but stepping back, you realize that that isn’t true. We were not there. There is no knowing, and so we fall short in the same way that David does.

  11. James

    Damn my lateness. Apologies.

    Rex-
    There were two really fascinating moments that I thought could be useful in combining them with your idea of Coetzee complicating the narrative of his own life. The first was in the Nobel Prize Lecture–he begins the speech on Foe by making this really odd, almost academic-sounding distinction between the “me” and the “he”–as if he were making distinctions between his intellectual experiences and his selfhood. I think I may have said this to you during the break, but the way he inhabits his body radically changes once he begins to read his “lecture”–when he talks about himself, he looks a lot like a bad actor someone hired to play J. M. Coetzee. The other thing that I somewhat wondered about was the backlash politically, in South Africa. Did Coetzee, or his publishers, or anyone affiliated with him ever respond to it?

    Emily-
    One thing I wondered at in your presentation was the role of Lucy and her character arc, which traces a really interesting path when put next to the one you illustrated with David. I agree with your idea that he starts out as a man with extremely self-centered principles–a rigorously self-absorbed man–and I think he moves away from that as the book goes on. But Lucy, who begins grounded in the earth–I wondered if towards the end of the book, her decision to stay, in the discussions she has with her father, if she too is moving away from where she started, going to the land of principals. (It is comforting, though, to think that one of the last images we get of her is of her in the fields.) I also wondered, and wasn’t sure if this was touched on in discussion given all the dustup about David–is Lucy flawed? Does the novel point to her flaws? It seems somewhat…impolite…to critique the reactions of a rape victim, but I wonder if one of the things we are asked to do here is just that. To ask, as Coetzee does, without pity.

  12. Samuel Davidson

    Rex I enjoyed your contribution to our discussion. I needed to hear Coetzee talk – even if the writer seems to believe that the “author is dead,” understanding him helps me understand his work – specifically the tone. I remember that the Newsweek review on the back of the book said this: “Despite the snarled moralities that keep this story dark, light and air push up between the sentences like tiny miracles.” I couldn’t disagree more – not that the sentences aren’t beautiful, which they are, but the suggestion that lightness and air and, really, hope, are present in this novel. I think Coetzee is quite critical of humankind in general, and sees the world as being almost only a dark and snarled place. Rex’s presentation on Coetzee’s background reaffirmed my reading of Disgrace’s tone.
    Emily I think you did a good job of laying out many topics of conversation for us to start discussion from. I’d like to put my two cents in about the theme of power structures in the novel. For me that’s what the novel is really about – the tension between the power structures which have existed, and the ones which exist now and will begin to evolve into the future. David is an example of the previous hierarchy of power – a hierarchy where educated white males were arbitrarily put into positions of dominance. I say arbitrarily because there is nothing about David Lurie that deserves respect or admiration, or deference. He abuses his power, and the worst part is that he is seemingly unconscious of his abuse, unconscious of his place in the hierarchy. I think we were trying to come to some sort of conclusion about why Melanie’s seduction was so off-putting. Although Lurie says he was a “servant of Eros,” we know that’s bullshit. When you are in a position of power, YOU are the one who needs to know when to stop, when to control desire, when to understand the context surrounding a white professor having sex with a black, sleeping pill-addicted student in post-apartheid South Africa. I think this connects to some grander themes in the novel. I don’t think David Lurie really changed – as in, I don’t think he became more conscious, more empathetic by the story’s end. After he has sex with the prostitute he says that he is just “neither good nor bad.” The only addition to David’s character is a touch of self-awareness. When he says that he is “giving up” the dog towards the end of the novel, I saw the underlying meaning as David giving up power. He’s giving up being the father to anything – giving up assuming that he is wiser, knows better, that he can help or protect anything. I think David does equate dogs with women and I don’t know if that ever changes. He just gives up trying to be something that is so fallical and misplaced to begin with – a patriarchal character to those around him. David, of course, can represent former colonial powers in a different sort of reading (and also humans who treat animals as inferior, a whole other long topic of conversation) – the novel seems to argue that what they did was wrong, they never understood it was wrong and still may not, and since they cannot change and mostly lack self-awareness, the best thing they can do is give up trying to be patriarchs to other countries and die of old age. No laughs or smiles for Coetzee regarding these issues.

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