Cutting Out Their Tongues: Rape and Silence in Disgrace

As part of a graduate seminar on J. M. Coetzee’s work, I am posting my seminar paper on the treatment of rape and feminine silence in Disgrace on this blog. I also touch on representations of rape, torture, and silence in In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Elizabeth Costello.

The link for the essay is at the top of the page just above the title bar. Please click on “Seminar Paper: Cutting Out Their Tongues” for a linked table of contents and some additional relevant links and resources. Thank you for reading.

I also wanted to thank my seminar colleagues Daniel Linton and Ligia Lesko for their feedback on a draft of this paper.

Reflections

After having read through nearly all of J.M. Coetzee’s body of work, I thought I would offer some rather disjointed observations:

– My favorite novel was Waiting for the Barbarians, I think firstly because it’s beautifully written and I feel like this is the point where his prose style shifted, matured, I suppose. I also find Coetzee’s portrayal of the Magistrate as moving as it is disturbing, which is to say, quite a lot. None of Coetzee’s characters are “heroes” in the classic sense. Coetzee, apparently, does not do heroes. But the Magistrate is a sympathetic character and the way he grapples with his collusion with evil was more human to me than, say, David Lurie’s rather esoteric musings on his place in the new South Africa.

– I also really enjoyed Foe. My inner lit nerd delights in its re-writing of the canon text Robinson Crusoe, and I appreciate its play on the autobiographical form. And once again, I enjoyed the lyrical quality of the writing, especially in the more dream-like sequences. It’s also one of the few novels where female silence can be read as empowering without too much critical backbending. It’s the one novel that poses a serious challenge to my own problems with Coetzee’s other portrayals of feminine silence. It’s also the novel that made me start seriously questioning Coetzee’s portrayal of black men.

– I didn’t like Disgrace. Disregarding its complex, confusing, and ambivalent portrayal of post-apartheid South Africa, I just didn’t feel any sort of connection to any of the characters. None of them were human to me; their actions seemed constantly disconnected from context. And as much as David’s compassion toward animals helps add depth to his otherwise dispassionate and very unsympathetic character, it’s hard to read a novel that follows a character that you feel so little for. As a scholar, I can appreciate the nuance and complexity of Disgrace, but I didn’t enjoy it.

– Coetzee’s novels have been some of the most difficult for me to read. They are, with very few exceptions, very dark. And those few that aren’t, certainly aren’t happy-ending types either. I continue to be puzzled by Elizabeth Costello’s critique of the portrayal of evil in “The Problem of Evil” in Elizabeth Costello. Whether or not you consider Costello to be Coetzee’s fictional doppelganger (and I don’t, not really), it’s hard not to wonder what his intentions are, particularly with Costello who he literally performs during his lectures that made up Elizabeth Costello. I was puzzled by this critique of the portrayal of evil because Coetzee’s treatment of violence, torture, and rape has been some of the most difficult literature for me to read. Is he commenting on his own writing via Costello? Or perhaps there is some essential difference between what Coetzee does and what Costello is criticizing that I am not perceiving? Is he talking about realism rather than evil then?

– On that note, I come away from Coetzee’s body of work with many more questions than I had when I first opened Dusklands. I still have so many questions, but that is certainly not a bad thing.

Enter Elizabeth Costello

“From the opening of the chapter, from the incident on Magill Road to the present, he has not behaved well, has not risen to the occasion: that much is clear to him” (15).

Slow Man, for the first third of the novel or so, lulls us into that familiar sense of suspended disbelief – the unreflective (well, as much as one can be unreflective – and unsuspicious – when reading anything by Coetzee) state of mind that can be associated with the traditional, realist novel. There is a man. He loses his leg. He’s unhappy and resentful, but complex enough to be “believable”. The plot is sufficiently interesting. Like in Disgrace, the text is almost immediately dialogic, even as an apparently realist narrative. We read through Paul Rayment’s third person perspective, but we have questions, we do not trust our narrative blindly (or is that just my automatic repose having now read through so many of Coetzee’s works? I do not trust Coetzee very much, apparently.).

And then, suddenly, without warning (or so it would seem), the narrative drops the floor out from under us. “‘Mr. Rayment?’ says the voice on the entryphone. ‘Elizabeth Costello here. May I speak with you?'” The way in which Costello enters the text is dramatic as a device, but stylistically, this introduction is as flat as we would expect of Coetzee, which makes her entrance all the more startling. The rules of the game have shifted, and it’s as if Coetzee is standing there shrugging his shoulders and muttering, “What did you expect?”

And so the text – suddenly – becomes another kind of metafiction, another Elizabeth Costello. Costello (of Slow Man) is the same woman – the same writer – as the woman and writer in Elizabeth Costello and The Lives of Animals. But she is also different. She enter the text and she intercedes in it; the text becomes suddenly self-conscious. She begins to write the text.

And yet, in familiar Coetzee style, there are clues that there is more going on in this novel that meets the eye from nearly the first moment. Shortly after Paul gets out of surgery, the “narrator” (whoever that is – ha!) “says”, “From the opening of the chapter, from the incident on Margil Road tot he present, he has not behaved well, has not risen to the occasion: that much is clear to him” (15).

From the opening of the chapter. That’s more than a turn of phrase, referring to some sort of beginning. It’s the text being self-conscious. And the words are something like Costello might tell him – “take charge” (100), “live like a hero” (229). So, then, is Costello intervening in the text even before she walks through Paul’s door? She can quote the first line of the novel – is she writing the text? Is Slow Man her text, at least within the (meta)fictional confines of the text’s (for lack of a better word) reality?

Equivocation and Rape

“Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core” (25).

We think of things like rape, murder, war, genocide (etc., etc.) as definable horrors. Even if lawyers and politicians haggle over definitions, when they happen, we will recognize them, right? And yet, apparently not.

I admit on my first reading of David Lurie’s encounter with Melanie, I did not recognize the rape – as, I think, the author intended. But, disturbingly so, even as I was caught up in Lurie’s point of view, I drew my highlighter over these sentences: “All she does is avert herself: avert her lips, avert her eyes.” And then a paragraph later: “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away” (25). I felt disquieted, disturbed, but not enough. Not as, I think later, I should have been.

It is not until I’ve finished the novel, until I’ve “watched” Lucy’s attack (but not at all, since unlike Melanie’s violation, Lucy’s takes place “offstage”), until I’ve finished the novel altogether and even re-read certain sections, it is not until then that I come to terms with the insidious quality of those first few chapters, the real implications of that little line: “Not rape, not quite that.” How can it be not quite rape? Is there such thing as a partial rape? A half-rape? A rape that was almost rape but not quite rape? I don’t mean in the context of what is prosecutable – culpability under the law is something altogether different from moral culpability, isn’t it?

All the signifiers are there: the averting of the gaze, the passivity, the lack of desire, the dying within herself in order to endure the act. Although Lurie doesn’t take her violently, he takes her as a man claiming power over her; he is older, he is her professor, he is white. And that is the crux of it, I think. There is no mutuality in the act; he is simply claiming something he thinks he is entitled to. (Because, after all, “She does not own herself. Beauty does not own itself” (16). In a world where he is losing his place, his authority, he reclaims it all through Melanie, however fleetingly.

And that, I think, is perhaps Coetzee’s aim – my initial response to Melanie’s rape causes me some level of shame. Like Lurie, who recognizes the horror of Lucy’s rape and is viscerally effected by it but cannot recognize his own culpability, I too was blind. So that when I realize (and I think perhaps I should have realized it earlier, directly in the aftermath of Lucy’s rape when the parallels first presented themselves) it, it changes everything, everything about the novel.

Disgrace Movie Trailer

I’m resisting watching the movie till I’ve finished processing the novel because I don’t want the film influencing my perception of the book. Still, I’ll be interested to see how the film interprets Disgrace.

This Silence of Hers

“She finds it good, it pleases her, this silence of hers, a silence she hopes to preserve to the grave” (Coetzee 166).

J.M. Coetzee’s works – and I am thinking particularly of Elizabeth Costello, but also The Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace and Foe and even Waiting for the Barbarians – explore the limitations of language. Specifically, he explores the ability – or, in this case, lack thereof – of language to articulate trauma; he attempts to reinvent silence as a means, if not of protest, then at least of agency.

And while as a project I do not wholly object to silence as resistance (I am thinking particularly of King-kok Cheung’s work Articulate Silences, which re-reads silences in classic Asian American texts as a means of alternative articulation for the doubly silenced (Cheung 28).), I cannot help but still feel uneasy at Coetzee’s, forgive me, articulation of it.

In Elizabeth Costello, Costello narrates how she has refused to tell or write of the rape committed upon her in the context of her condemnation of Paul West’s book that “obscene(ly)” (Coetzee 159), as she puts it, depicts the execution of Hitler’s would-be assassins. So in Elizabeth Costello, is silence a moral choice to not bring evil into the light, giving it power once again, bringing what is dead and should remain dead back to the life? And yet, in a curious turn, Coetzee’s narrator graphically narrates Costello’s rape (“‘You like that, do you?’ he whispered as he twisted her nipples. ‘You like that?'”). What then is the purpose of silence here? It is obviously not that such evil shouldn’t be narrated, that writers should not write such things, because Coetzee does exactly that. Even the description of the offending chapter of West’s book is graphically described. Coetzee is not, I must assume, speaking about authorial silence then, at least not here in Elizabeth Costello.

When I consider his depictions of the silent victim in his other novels – Michael K, the barbarian girl, Friday, Lucy – I find the pattern disturbing. Michael K, the barbarian girl, and Friday ostensibly “choose” to be silenced in resistance to their oppressors, but they are also actively silenced. Both Michael K and Friday’s respective disabilities serve as silencing mechanisms that “choose” silence on their behalf, complicating any argument for silence as purely agential. And I think it must be asked – what is the significance of having every female rape victim choose silence as their response? Even meek Melanie is portrayed as not having chosen to speak against David Laurie, instead others speak for her – her own voice is never heard, she merely looks away, literally and figuratively.

I am not suggesting that I think that Coetzee has got it wrong in his depiction of victims as silently resisting, but I do find it troubling and it’s a potent unresolved issue for me as I read through Coetzee’s novels. The question lurks persistently – why? Why must they be silent? Why are the aggressors so often given voice, why are we as readers privy to all their morally ambiguous consciousness, but the victims are made to close their lips, swallow their stories “like an egg, an egg of stone, one that will never crack open, never give birth” (Coetzee 166)?

Works Cited:

Cheung, King Kok. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamato, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogowa. Ithica: Cornell U, 1993.

Coetzee, J.M. Elizabeth Costello. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.

The Noble Savage and Coetzee

In J.M. Coetzee’s essay “Idleness in South Africa,” Coetzee’s otherwise perceptive observations about the history of the Hottentot’s “idleness” as described by pre-20th century visitors to South Africa are interrupted by a rather perplexing interlude on the Hottentot as the proverbial Noble Savage. He writes:

“Nowhere in the great echo chamber of the Discourse of the Cape is a voice raised to ask whether the life of the Hottentot may not be a version of life before the Fall…a life in which man is not yet condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, but instead may spend his days dozing in the sun, or in the shade when the sun grows too hot, half-aware of the singing of the birds and the breeze on his skin, bestirring himself to eat when hunger overtakes him, enjoying a pipe of tobacco when it is available, at one with his surroundings and unreflexively content. The idea that the Hottentot may be Adam is not even entertained for the sake of being dismissed” (18).

Here, Coetzee apparently falls into a sort of reverse of the projection of which he is accusing those early observers of the Hottentots. While they projected their own anxieties and obsessions with work and its relationship to the worth and spirituality of Man, Coetzee appears to be projecting – to some extent – an idealized vision of the Hottentot way of life. His description sets up a binary opposition between Western European civilization – or, as he describes it, the life of the ant (19) – and the Hottentot civilization – the life of the grasshopper (19). He takes pains to not make value judgments in the same way the travel writers did, but in suggesting that this figuring of the Hottentots as pre-lapsarian figures would have been favorable to the one given, he nonetheless reveals that he himself is unable to conceive of them outside of a projected, Euro-centric and inherited perspective. In a way, it seems to me, Coetzee falls into the same trap that those travel writers did; but instead of condemning the other in opposition to the self, Coetzee exoticizes it. He goes so far as to compare the descriptions of the Hottentots with those of the Native Americans, the Chinese, and the Turks (18 and 23), suggesting by extension that the exoticization of the other is preferable to the condemnation of it. This is troubling to me because it is clear that there is condemnation in the exoticization of the other, even if that condemnation is more subtle, insiduous. In this re-framing of the Hottentots as Noble Savages, does Coetzee not condemn them to this Euro-framed vision? Like Friday, the “savage” in Coetzee’s novel Foe, who cannot speak, cannot frame his own narrative, his own story, his own vision of himself, are the Hottentots just another set of savages with their tongues cut out?

I admit I find this essay of Coetzee’s troubling in light of Foe and even The Life and Times of Michael K. Or perhaps it is the other way around: that I feel my opinion of Foe and Michael K shifting in light of the subtle revelations in this essay. Is Coetzee simply trading the ugly savage for a “noble” one? Is Friday just another Noble Savage “at one with his surroundings and unreflexively content” (18)? And what of Michael K? Is their silence really a silence of dissent or is it a silence of absence – a void, a great O, filled in by the cacophony of imposed white voices, including Coetzee’s?*

*In writing this, I hear the echo of Spivak’s words in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak”. It’s obvious that Coetzee is struggling with these issues in his novels, but this essay in particular strikes me as particularly unself-aware, which is surprising to me.

Gender and the Author in Foe

“Now I pin my hair up under my hat and wear a coat at all times, hoping to pass for a man” (101).

In Coetzee’s novel Foe, Susan Barton crosses back and forth across the borders of gender while she explores the various implications of giving her story to Daniel Foe, the enigmatic author that Barton chooses to present her story to the public.

Sometimes that crossing is literal. In the passage quoted above, Barton is accosted by “two drunken soldiers” while en route to Brighton and takes to dressing like a man to protect herself. In and of itself, this incident might be nothing more than what it is on the surface, but coupled with Barton’s challenging of gender roles, particularly as it pertains to authorship, I read this particular passage as a literal representation of her exploration of gender roles.

Throughout the novel, Barton struggles with the implications of giving her story over to Foe. After finding Foe’s hiding place, she tells him “When I wrote my memoir for you…I wished that there were such a being as a man-Muse” (126) so that she could write the story herself. She ultimately concedes that there is no such thing, but she tries to refigure the Muse as a position of power in relation to the artist. Thus, in the midst of her struggle to retain control over her narrative, she couples with Foe and takes the dominant position saying, “This is the manner of the Muse when she visits her poets…She must do whatever lies in her power to father her offspring” (140). Later she tells Foe that inasmuch as Foe has borne her story, she “think[s] of [him] as a mistress, or even, if I dare speak the word, as a wife” (152). This radical gendering of the author, particularly in relation to Barton who herself adopts various “wife” roles even when she is not a wife, suggests an intriguing play on the gendered language that surrounds the act of writing.

Nevertheless, Barton’s literal and figurative crossings are puzzling to me in the context of her relationship with both Cruso and Foe. She both submits to them and challenges their authority. She struggles to retain her autonomy in Cruso’s “kingdom,” and yet she submits to be his “wife” once they are saved, even to the point of taking his name. Later, she struggles to retain control over her narrative against Foe’s insistent encroachments, but it remains outside of my understanding who ultimately “wins” this power struggle (or if that is even the point, after all). At times she refers to Foe as her “master” (146) and in practical terms she is at his mercy, but she nonetheless seems intent on regaining her autonomy.

A Desperate Imagination in In the Heart of the Country

“But I have quite another sense of myself, glimmering tentatively somewhere in my inner darkness…” (41)

Magda, the anti-heroine of In the Heart of the County, yearns to transcend the limitations of her desert-bound life. She is trapped both in the vast barrenness of her father’s desolate desert farm and within the confines of her own “interiority” (35). And yet that very internal life – so disparate from her small, submissive outward life – is also presented as her sole means of escape. Within her vivid imagination, she can conjure scenarios in which she is empowered, in which she is not simply bound to “dwindle and expire here in the heart of the country” (23).

Indeed, the novel opens with one of her imaginings. Magda describes in vivid detail the coming of her father’s new bride, their lovemaking, the desperate desolation she feels in the wake of this new woman’s coup. (For that is how Magda sees it; the new wife as a “rival [mistress]” (7)) Finally, in the wake of their lovemaking one night, Magda sets upon their sleeping forms and murders them both with an ax. It is not until Magda has done the deed and considered the disposal of the bodies (“Am I strong enough to move them unaided in a wheelbarrow, or must I hack away until I have portable sections?” (15)), that it is revealed that a new wife never came, that in fact it is her father’s African servant who has taken a new wife.

This vivid interior dream world in which Magda lives – for her exterior world is so stilted in the first half of the book that it cannot be said that she truly lives within it; she merely exists – surely has her teetering on the edge of insanity (if not already plunged over it). But it is also her only means of escape, of life, of agency. Throughout the novel, when exterior action eludes her, when the walls of the desert and her farmhouse and her father and her loneliness close in on her, she slips into these dream narratives where she creates alternate storylines and endings. Coetzee, through Magda, thus plays with the reader’s sense of reality while evoking the unsettling consequences of the deep-seated desolation, detachment, and rage that are the fruits of South African colonialism.