Disgrace

“He has become a teacher again, man of the book, guardian of the culture-hoard.”

David tries to seduce Melanie by citing lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1. He immediately regrets his decision, however, as this only affirms the power dynamic between them, reminding them that he is her teacher and she is his student. Clearly, he is aware from the start of the imbalance in power between them, but nevertheless coerces her into a relationship.

“She opens the door wearing a crumpled T-shirt, cycling shorts, slippers in the shape of comic-book gophers which he finds silly, tasteless.”

David resents Melanie’s slippers because they seem childish to him. These childish slippers remind him of the inappropriateness of their relationship: He cannot deny her youth. Still, David couches this inappropriateness in intellectualism, masking his self-loathing by assuring himself that the slippers are silly and tasteless rather than childish. This subtle shift in thinking allows David to perceive the slippers as a product of Melanie’s flaws—her silliness, her lack of taste—rather than admit his own exploitative behavior.

“On the contrary, we are invited to understand and sympathize. But there is a limit to sympathy.”

In his classes, David talks eloquently about the role of sympathy in literature. Poets invite readers to understand and sympathize with their characters, even those that are as flawed and seemingly beyond redemption as Byron’s Lucifer. However, David claims that there is a limit to sympathy, and this is a metafictional moment that comments on his own acts of sexual violence and how readers of the novel might perceive them.

“Elaine Winter takes her cue. She has never liked him; she regards him as a hangover from the past, the sooner cleared away the better.”

In the confrontational hearing, David projects his own self-criticisms onto the minds of his opponents. The narration does not enter nor explore Elaine’s thoughts, sticking instead to David’s perception of her thoughts. David feels that since Elaine Winter dislikes him, she must regard him as a relic of the past. These criticisms subconsciously reveal David’s ideas about himself and his struggles to adjust to post-apartheid South Africa. He feels like a hangover from the past, though he never openly accepts this.

“Repentance is neither here nor there. Repentance belongs to another world, to another universe of discourse.”

David’s arrogance becomes clear during and after the hearing. Though he knows that he has acted inappropriately, he attempts to achieve some intellectual victory over the committee by casting the sincerity of his apology in doubt. David is a professor of literature, so he frames his ideas in a battle over the subtext of his words. David prefers to win this petty, inconsequential victory rather than issue a sincere statement of apology; he is more concerned with massaging his own ego than admitting fault, so he searches for any possible way to assert his superiority over the people who are about to fire him.

“It reminds me too much of Mao’s China.”

In his mind, David has constructed a version of his hearing in which he is a hero on a moral campaign. When he says these words aloud, however, he realizes his own melodrama. He compares himself to a political prisoner rather than accepting responsibility for his actions, prioritizing his own ego over any catharsis he might be able to offer to his victim, Melanie. In David’s mind, he needs to feel like he is the victim; he does not think of Melanie in any context other than intermittent sexual fantasies.

“He is surprised by his outburst. He is not in a bad temper, not in the least.”

David is surprised not because of the content of his statement but because he has noticed it at all. He is being contrarian, vehemently arguing positions against his own daughter merely for the sake of argument. Ironically, he will later have an affair with Bev and work alongside her at the animal clinic. David’s surprise is a hint at his potential for self-awareness, though it remains distant.

“A shadow of grief falls over him: for Katy, alone in her cage, for himself, for everyone.”

For the first time in the novel, David feels pity for a creature other than himself after he spends time with an abandoned dog. Katy the dog—more so than Melanie, Lucy, or Petrus—is the catalyst for any potential change in David. When he lists out who he feels sorry for, Katy comes first, then himself, then everyone else. This is the first time that David has not prioritized himself.

“Those that no one wants. We’ll put them down.”

David sympathizes with the unwanted dogs because he feels as unwanted and out of place as they are. His thoughts grow more pessimistic, his reputation grows more disgraced, and he himself grows older, and he begins to feel that his fate may inevitably be like that of the dogs. He has been symbolically euthanized by society and sent to the countryside to die because he has outgrown his usefulness and is unwanted.

“There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them.”

In the wake of the attack, David feels immense pity for his daughter and tries to imagine how the world can help women who have suffered in this fashion. While he is very critical of the men who attacked him and Lucy, the limits of his empathy are shown in his complete lack of understanding of the female world. He cannot discern the similarities between what happened to Lucy and what he did to Melanie—he refuses to think that he is anything like Lucy’s rapists.

“Bill Shaw believes that, because he and David Lurie once had a cup of tea together, David Lurie is his friend, and the two of them have obligations towards each other.”

David is genuinely surprised by Bill’s unselfishness and kindness. He reiterates this disbelief, knowing that he would not help Bill in the same way that Bill has helped him. Bill’s sincere kindness is a jolt to the jaded, cynical David; yet, David will not consider this when he instigates an affair with Bev, Bill’s wife, later in the novel.

“No wonder they are so vehement against rape, she and Helen. Rape, god of chaos and mixture, violator of seclusions. Raping a lesbian worse than raping a virgin: more of a blow.”

In the aftermath of the attack, David struggles to comprehend what may have happened to his daughter. He avoids any specifics as his anxieties build; however, he cannot wait any longer. For the first time since the attack, the word “rape” is used in various conjugations, in various ways. The subject thrusts itself to the forefront of David’s mind and he cannot bury it any longer. As a coping mechanism, he tries to rationalize and intellectualize the subject, only to come up against the brutal reality of what happened to his daughter.

“Of what women undergo at the hands of men.”

David believes that Lucy’s decision not to mention her rape to the police is because of his own recent history with Melanie. His suggestion is indicative of his narcissism. He turns the most traumatic experience in his daughter’s life and her response to this trauma into an implied criticism of his own crimes. Subconsciously, he is beginning to associate the two acts, thereby castigating himself alongside Lucy’s attackers. David’s narcissism is inflected with a growing sense of guilt regarding his own actions.

“Of the books he brought from Cape Town, only two volumes of the letters are left.”

David’s experiences with Lucy have changed him unexpectedly. His old self is drifting away, and he can no longer identify with the old version of David that planned to write a Byron opera. The stolen books are a symbol of this change: The books are gone, just like David’s former self, and neither can be retrieved. Only two copies are left, and only parts of the old David remain following everything that has happened.

“No: that is Lucy’s last word to him.”

David’s recent life has been defined by two instances of women’s withholding their consent and David overruling them. The first is that he forced himself on Melanie, using his power over her to sexually assault her. Second, Lucy asserts her agency against her father in the aftermath of her rape and asks him to not get involved in her life. Once again, David struggles to acquiesce to a woman’s stated desires.

“He does not seem to have the gift of hardness.”

David is not a particularly compassionate man. He is abrasive, emotionally distant, and inconsiderate of other people’s desires. His treatment of Melanie, as well as many other women, suggests an incapacity to empathize with others. However, he feels very emotional when euthanizing dogs, which creates a contrast with his lack of compassion toward humans, especially women. David covets his cruelty, thinking of it as a “gift” because it hurts him to feel compassion.

“This is what I will have to get used to, this and even less than this.”

After David has sex with Bev, he reflects on his status, regarding himself as a man who has fallen from a great height. He does not find Bev attractive, comparing her to the previous woman he had sex with: young and beautiful Melanie. By contrasting the two women, David is constructing a measurement of his decline. He does not see these women as people, and his sexual encounters are not expressions of love or connection. To David, these encounters and these women are simply markers of his status, illustrating his petty self-involvement and grandiose notions of himself.

“I can’t imagine, in this life, not being Lucy’s father.”

After leaving Cape Town, David is forced to reassess his self-identity. He has adopted the mantle of father, even though he has been distant from Lucy for many years. In this moment, particularly after the attack, his role as her father has filled the vacuum of his identity that was created by his dismissal from the college. Now, he cannot imagine abandoning this identity. Without this hastily assembled understanding of himself, he does not know who or what he will be. He is only a father to Lucy in a temporary sense—it is a placeholder identity until he learns more about his actual self.

“He remembers Melanie, on the first evening of their closer acquaintance, sitting beside him on the sofa drinking the coffee with the shot-glass of whisky in it that was intended to—the word comes up reluctantly—lubricate her.”

The more that David confronts his past, the less he can deny his calculated plans to assault Melanie. Though he has espoused grandiose, literary explanations for why he desired Melanie, he cannot escape the details of his own sordid actions. He plied her with alcohol deliberately to lower her inhibitions; David’s own recollections disgust him. The more he thinks about himself, the closer he seems to the men who attacked Lucy.

“He wanders through the house taking a census of his losses. His bedroom has been ransacked, the cupboards yawn bare.”

When David returns to his house in Cape Town, he discovers that he has been robbed. This robbery contrasts with the attack on Lucy’s house. The earlier attack was defined by intense violence, which David could not intervene in or escape. However, the second burglary occurred when he was not even present, affecting him in a material way but not in a psychological way. It illustrates David’s alienation from his old life; his old self has been plundered, but he is no longer affected by this realization.

“No country, this, for old men.”

David references the poet Yeats when reflecting on his place in society as he ages. For many years, literature has provided David with an identity—he was a professor and a scholar of literature. Now, however, David has lost his identity. He reaches out to literary references as a way of positioning himself within society. These former foundational elements of his life now have new meaning as he views the world and himself differently. He is no longer citing literature in his capacity as a public scholar or a teacher, but as a way to personally understand himself. He has become one of Yeats’s old men, and his country no longer feels recognizable to him.

“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.”

Lucy inverts David’s pretentiousness. Amid his flurry of literary referencing, she turns the technique of literary criticism against him. She analyzes her father as though he were a character in a novel, while also pointing out the absurdity of attempting to understand the world in this manner. David views himself as a literary protagonist among a crowd of supporting characters. As Lucy points out, each person has their own life and their own agency, rather than existing solely to tell David’s story. She uses literary terms to drive this point home, which undermines his notion that he is the only intellectual among a crowd of less-intelligent people.

“He ought to apologize. But he cannot.”

So much of David’s character is based on him recognizing his flaws and mistakes but having too much pride or arrogance admit them. He knows that he should apologize, as he should so often do, but he simply does not. David exists in a world where he watches himself act against his own best interests, coming to the slow realization that this toxic behavior has left him alone and miserable, but he is still unable to stop himself.