“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.