Aneconomy in an economy of melancholy

Embodiment and gendered identity in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace

Bibliographic Data

ID7559544
AuthorsLouise Bethlehem (0000-0003-2567-0134, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume1
Issue2
Pages167-185
Publication date2003-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrican Identities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1472-5843 • E-ISSN: 1472-5851
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1472584032000175641
OpenAlexW2081333220
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited17

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1The epigraph to July's People reads: ‘The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.’ Michael Marais's analysis of Disgrace revisits the notion of morbidity, chiefly in its citation of Athol Fugard's response to the novel: ‘That white women are going to accept being raped as penance for what was done in the past? Jesus! It's an expression of a very morbid phenomenon, very morbid’ (cited in Marais 2001 —. 2003. ‘“After the Death of a Certain God”: A Case for Levinasian Ethics’. Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, 8 (1): 27–33. [Google Scholar]: 32). 2I am drawing on Judith Butler's elaboration of Foucault in her exposition of the hetero-normative attribution of agency to sex: ‘sex initiates the unfolding of ourselves, remains the causal condition of desire, is linked to the disclosure and conferral of truth on the self that is displayed in and through our various thoughts and deeds' (1990: 14). As always, when Butler is referenced in my work, I am grateful to Catherine Rottenberg for her insights, and for bringing this particular article to my attention. 3See Graham 2002 Gross Aeyal Forthcoming. ‘The Constitution in Reconciliation and Transitional Justice – Lessons from South Africa and Israel', Stanford Journal of International Law [Google Scholar] for further discussion of ‘sacrificial responsibility’ in Disgrace. 4For more on the overcoding of similes with synaesthetic or otherwise tropological grounds of comparison, see my article ‘Simile and Figurative Language’ (Bethlehem 1996 Bethlehem, Louise. 1996. ‘Simile and Figurative Language’. Poetics Today, 17 (2): 203–40. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 5I refer you again to the opening paragraph of the novel: ‘On Thursday afternoons he drives to Green Point. Punctually at two p.m. he presses the buzzer at the entrance to Windsor Mansions, speaks his name, and enters. Waiting for him at the door of No. 113 is Soraya’ (Coetzee 1999 —. 1999 Disgrace, London: Secker and Warburg, London [Google Scholar]: 1, emphasis mine). 6I am engaging in a deliberate decontextualization of Coetzee's text at this point: these words, in their original form in Disgrace, were spoken by Lurie not, supposedly, on his own behalf, but on behalf of his daughter: ‘I am Lucy's father. I want those men to be caught and brought before the law and punished. Am I wrong? Am I wrong to want justice?’ (Coetzee 1999 —. 1999 Disgrace, London: Secker and Warburg, London [Google Scholar]: 119). 7Such reasoning is clearly at work in Elaine Scarry's arguments concerning the realization of pain: ‘As an actual physical fact, a weapon is an object that goes into the body and produces pain. As a perceptual fact, it lifts the pain out of the body and makes it visible, or more precisely, it acts as a bridge or mechanism across which some of pain's attributes – its incontestable reality, its totality, its ability to eclipse all else, its power of dramatic alteration and world dissolution – can be lifted away from their source, can be separated from the sufferer and referred to power, broken off from the body and attached instead to the regime. Now, at least for the duration of this obscene and pathetic drama, it is not the pain but the regime that is incontestably real, not the pain but the regime that is total, not the pain but the regime that is able to eclipse all else, not the pain but the regime that is able to dissolve the world’ (1985: 56, my emphasis, L.B.). 8I have reduplicated Krog's punctuation, as well as, of necessity, the anonymity of the victims, all presumably women, as they appear in her account. By no means all of the victims whose stories are recounted in Krog's narrative are anonymous. Whether the victims are named or not, I find it necessary to resist their interpolation into my text as mere metonyms. Their singularity exceeds any historical or theoretical narrative, and its residue haunts me, haunts my text. 9Benjamin suggests that functions signified as feminine and maternal be associated with the ‘active mother’ as well as with agency or ‘authorship’: ‘We might contend that sexual subjectivity is constituted as much by being able to own desire, contain excitement, hold it (metaphorically speaking) ‘inside’ the body rather than evacuating it immediately through discharge ... The vagina can represent the quality of ownership, of containing one's desire and excitement, without which active subjectivity is thinned to a defensive construct’ (1998: 76–7). I am suggesting that Lucy comes to ‘own’ her fetus, despite its provenance, as an active statement of desire in accordance with a similar logic. 10‘My governing claim,’ writes Critchley in a formulation indebted to Benveniste through Lacan (see Critchley 1992 Critchley Simon 1992 The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida & Levinas, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell [Google Scholar]: 7), ‘is that these insights, interruptions or alterities are moments of ethical transcendence, in which a necessity other than that of ontology announces itself within the reading, an event in which the ethical Saying of the text overrides its ontological Said’ (ibid.: 30). 11 The time of the present: also, the habitual tense of narration in the novel, as Gareth Cornwell points out (2002). 12The interrelation of dehiscence and ethical work in Derrida and Levinas is explored in Critchley, 1992 Critchley Simon 1992 The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida & Levinas, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell [Google Scholar]: 108–20. For a defence of the validity of the Levinasian approach for Coetzee criticism, see Marais 2003 Minkley Gary Rassool Ciraj Witz Leslie 1996 ‘Thresholds, Gateways and Spectacles: Journeying through South African Hidden Pasts and Histories in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century’, paper presented at the conference on ‘The Future of the Past: The Production of History in a Changing South Africa’, University of the Western Cape, 10–12 July [Google Scholar]. 13In a postscript published at the end of the eleventh volume of Le Séminaire, one which is not translated in the English version of the seminar, Lacan expounds on the notion of the ‘not-to-be-read’ in James Joyce. Jane Gallop renders his comments as follows: ‘‘The written as not-to-be-read it's Joyce who introduces it [l'introduit], rather I should say: l'intraduit. ’ ‘'Traduit’ means ‘translate’; ‘intraduit’ would produce ‘intranslate’ or ‘untranslate.’ ‘The written as not-to-be-read it's Joyce who unstranslates it.’ Yet this translation loses the pun. To maintain it we could translate ‘intraduit’ as ‘intraduce’: ‘it's Joyce who introduces it, rather I should say, intraduces it’ (Gallop 1985 Gordimer Nadine 1982 [1981] July's People, Harmondsworth: Penguin [Google Scholar]: 48). 14Michael Marais (2001 —. 2003. ‘“After the Death of a Certain God”: A Case for Levinasian Ethics’. Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, 8 (1): 27–33. [Google Scholar]: 33) has drawn attention to the mises-en-abyme of misreading in the novel that are enfolded around Lucy's accusation that David continually misreads her (Coetzee 1999 —. 1999 Disgrace, London: Secker and Warburg, London [Google Scholar]: 112). 15Cloister, as Critchley points out, is ‘clôture’ or ‘closture’ (1992: 62). 16 The gaze that David Lurie directs at his daughter's body is repeatedly voyeuristic: Lucy is wearing only a wrapper. As she rises, the sash slips loose and her breasts are bared. The last time he saw his daughter's breasts they were the demure rosebuds of a six-year-old. Now they are heavy, rounded, almost milky. A stillness falls. He is staring; the boy [Pollux, the rapist] is staring too, unashamedly. Rage wells up in him again, clouding his eyes. (Coetzee 1999 —. 1999 Disgrace, London: Secker and Warburg, London [Google Scholar]: 207) The turning, and returning of David's gaze to Lucy's body, to the ‘milky blue-veined skin’ behind her knees (ibid.: 217) is not disconnected from David's ideas concerning the visually erotic dimension of women's bodies. 17I want to distance my tactical reading of Lucy as lesbian masturbatrix from the stigmatized association between the two that has long been sedimented in Western discourses on homo- and auto-eroticism. For evidence of this sedimentation, see Vernon Rosario's comments on S.A.A.D. Tissot, the Enlightenment physician whose 1760 treatise'L'Onanisme, ou Dissertation physique sur les maladies produites par la masturbation’ had a formative impact on the ongoing moral stigmatization of masturbation (Bennet and Rosario II, 1995: 6; Rosario 1995 Scarry Elaine 1985 The Body in Pain: The Making and the Unmaking of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press [Google Scholar]: 103–7). Tissot explicitly links the ‘indifference ... for the legitimate pleasures of the hymen’ produced by masturbation, as well as its stimulation of an increasingly voracious need for sexual gratification, to the practice of ‘clitoridian’ pollution between ‘lesbides amatae’: ‘Women who love girls with as much ardor as the most passionate men’ (cited in Rosario ibid.: 114). 18See Sedgwick: ‘Because it escapes both the narrative of reproduction and (when practiced solo) even the creation of any interpersonal trace, it seems to have an affinity with amnesia, repetition or the repetition compulsion, and ahistorical or history-rupturing rhetorics of sublimity ... itself relatively traceless, [masturbation] may seem distinctively to threaten the orders of propriety and property’ (1993a: 111). 19‘Queer’, writes Sedgwick, ‘is a continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying, troublant’, and points out that the Latin root of the word means ‘across’, from the Indo-Latin torquere meaning to twist, and the English ‘athwart’ (1993b: xii)

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