DISGRACE, reviewed by Stephen Clark
It’s another year of Hollywood in blackface. Three films dealing with blacks came to us all at once. PRECIOUS, where, after dealing with 200 plus pound welfare mammies on the streets and in the grocery line hullking fore and aft, I’m to watch how sensitive and tragic their lives are. I’ll pass. There’s THE BLIND SIDE, where Sandra Bullock takes in a black boy, and her family raises him to become a football star, based on a real-life story. It’s an example of feel-good (‘Jesus-football-negroes’). And there is INVICTUS, where Nelson Mandela and South African rugby team do a kumbaya to show racial unity. No films about Santa or Jesus, but our real gods seem to be sports and diversity. So I’m reading books.
I just finished J.M. Coetzee’s DISGRACE, published in 1999. Coetzee, a South African writer, won the Booker prize with this study of a man’s decline in the new South Africa, one that isn’t necessarily new and improved. David Lurie is a professor of literature, in his fifties, a character found in much contemporary literature, the college professor who bangs his students while he wonders about death, existence, and culture. A similar Jewish version is in Phillip Roth’s THE DYING ANIMAL, and John Updike created several studies of academic roistering. As one of his characters remarks in MEMOIRS OF THE FORD ADMINISTRATION, getting a crack at the more nubile students was considered one of the perks of academia.
David teaches at Capetown University College just after the whites caved in. The Great Rationalization has come, which to David means dumbing down. The school becomes Cape Technical University. His lit courses are replaced by Communications 101, 201, etc. He is allowed one lit course a semester because it’s good for morale. He teaches Wordsworth. His morale is also kept up by sex. Divorced, with one daughter who lives in a lesbian commune, David sees Soroya, an employee of Discreet Escorts. He enjoys her Indian features and the clockwork manner of her lovemaking. She doesn’t get in the way. Life is good. Or is it?
Read the rest of this entry »