research blog post

Jolly, Rosemary. “Going to the Dogs: Humanity in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Ed. Jane Poyner. New York: Ohio UP, 2006. 148-71.

( Sidebar for the title: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was organized by the African National Congress after the abolition of apartheid, and its main object was to bear witness to both victims and perpetrators of racist actions during the apartheid era. Witnesses spoke of the violence they saw, victims of the violence done against them, and perpetrators of the violence they committed; trials were held, and ‘reconciliation’ was attempted. I obviously can’t comment on how effective this commission was, since I didn’t live through it and didn’t even know what it was until about two days ago, but it seems to me that holding a commission for racist crimes and hearing all sides – while terribly democratic of them – was a bit unnecessary. Jolly cites one man who’s defense at a murder trial was that he didn’t believe black men were human: he thought he was innocent of murder because he was “shooting an animal.” I get the feeling that quite a few people at this commission must have thought the same thing, and can only imagine what it must have been like to hear that kind of thing spoken at such a convention.

Also, Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals has Elizabeth Costello as its main protagonist, a woman who believes that “our treatment of animals as objects for consumption resembles the crime against humanity that is the Holocaust” (Jolly 151). )

“I wish to reflect on Disgrace as a text that demonstrates Coetzee’s commitment to the principle that, in order effectively to understand social violence, our most intimately held notions of what it means to be human need to be thoroughly scrutinized” (Jolly 150).

Jolly’s article is about the issue of humanity in Disgrace: the conflicting ideas that both Lucy and her attackers can be referred to as dogs, that Lurie achieves redemption for his rape of Melanie through his care for the dogs, and that the unwillingness of humanity to accept its own violence and its own instincts leads it to treat such instances as the work of ‘animals’. She also talks about “the body as ‘other’” (Jolly 152), what I interpreted as the separation between our conscious minds, capable of rational and intelligent thought, and the prison of our bodies, which chain our immortal minds to vulnerability, decay, and, most importantly, the animal need to survive. In this way, bodies are animal and thoughts are ‘human.’ She talks about rape and the ‘instrumentalizing’ of women in relation to masculine domination, an animal need to have the one who is marked “as [the] exotic, desirable other” (Jolly 161), as Lurie takes Soraya and Melanie, and as Lucy’s attackers hatefully take her.

Jolly further examines the differences between Lurie and his daughter’s attackers, between Melanie and Lucy, the chief of the latter being that Melanie tried to treat Lurie in the same way he treated her – sex as a commodity: good grades in exchange for compliance – and failed because Lurie, as the man, would not concede. Lucy’s enemy is merely man, and she stays to preserve the isolated life she’s made for herself.

Jolly’s arguments can be used in papers about David Lurie and Melanie, Lurie and his daughter, Lucy and her rapists, or Lurie and his dogs. Jolly goes to great lengths to talk about all of these relationships in regard to the presence (or absence) of humanity. She also goes to reference a great line from a scene in Waiting for the Barbarians, another Coetzee novel, in which the Magistrate is locked up and awaiting torture: “They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal” (WftB 115). This article is highly specific about the contrasting ideas of humanity and animalism, as well as how they overlap. Perhaps we can all agree that wild nature is highly violent – as the popular lion/gazelle example would illustrate – but nowhere else in the history of animal evolution does there exist another species that perpetrates violence as humans do.

Causasia… invisibility

So I thought it was interesting to note how many times invisibility is brought up in the novel. In the intro, Birdie talks about becoming white, blending in… disappearing into America. She thinks she’s invisibile at Dot’s going away party, and there’s alot of her and Cole spying on their mother and father. Deck’s theory is that white people like to be invisible – they don’t like to be looked at – and when Deck takes Birdie out to the park, at the end of the visit he tells her to observe, and ‘take notes’. He turns her into a spy earlier, too, when he tells her to keep a look out for Redbone in her mother’s house. Senna pushes Birdie around like that, one minute being the invisible white girl and the next being Deck’s observant black daughter. You feel bad for her, because once Carmen enters the picture – who practically pretends Birdie doesn’t exist once she sees her - and once things with her mother start to blow up, Birdie goes from being half of both in Boston to half-Jewish in Maine, which is the strangest and most random choice I think Sandy could have fixated on. The next section is heading into their time in hiding… I’m wondering how much farther Sandy is going to take Birdie, and if she’ll ever get caught. I’m also wondering if Cole and Birdie ever see each other again.

The Incredibles

Not only is this movie adorably awesome, it’s intelligent and reflective of huge themes in modern culture.  First and foremost, you have the abandoned superhero problem – what is a superhero’s worth to a society who doesn’t want his or her help? The Parr’s have to live with their powers, but keep them quiet; they have to hide who they are to be ‘normal’, something Violet says they know absolutely nothing about. Dash wants to be on the track team, but his mother won’t let him because she knows he’d excel effortlessly… and show off his powers. She says ‘everybody’s special’ in the car on the way home, and Dash angrily says that thats ‘another way of saying no one is.’ It’s funny that he and his family dwell so much on being different; Bob’s distraction and disinterest in his work, Helen’s child-rearing, and Dash’s and Violet’s constant arguments are definitely within the scope of normal for a family. I love the scene of the fight at dinner, where Dash and Violet end up using their powers against one another, and Helen tries to sort them out with her elastic arms. It’s a great image… definitely reminds me of my mother when my sister and I went at it as kids. The movie reinforces the family dynamic at the same time as it pushes forward the ‘super’ theme, and the idea that they’re in hiding: when the doorbell rings, they sort out in a split second.

So family and superpowers factor in huge, obviously. Next was the marriage dynamic, which I think was definitely part of what made the movie work for an older audience as well as a younger one. At the start of the movie, Elastigirl didn’t want to settle down… she marries Mr. Incredible, the country turns on superheroes, and suddenly she’s June Cleaver. She raises the kids while Bob brings the money in. After Mirage recruits Mr. Incredible for Syndrome’s machine, and Helen begins to fear that Bob is cheating on her, it becomes apparent that he’s going out on superhero jobs as well, and she calls enough enough and decides to go after him, inadvertantly bringing the kids along. They end up working through their family issues while working to save each other’s lives, and eventually also the city Syndrome threatens.

I love everything about this movie, but most of all the resolution. Bob and Helen resolve their marital issues, Violet stops being so shy, Dash goes out for the track team and takes second place in his race… not to mention Jack-Jack’s wonderful transformation… its like it took that much trouble for them to realize that normal was there the whole time, just ‘special’ in moderation.

paper thoughts

So right now I’m thinking of a topic in line with the family/nation thread of both Oscar Wao and Disgrace, specifically linking the idea of sex as a part of a national projected identity. Lucy tells David in Disgrace that her rape was, in the eyes of her attackers, the debt she owed to live on her land – that they were simply tax collectors, come to take their due. She repeatedly uses Africa in her arguements with David; her ‘this is Africa’ mentality assumes that Africa is a continent, South Africa a country, in which the inexcusable things that happen to women become acceptable – or, if not acceptable, then tolerable -  simply because they are commonplace. When Lucy and David are speaking about her rape in plain terms, she says, speaking of men and sex, ‘you are a man, you should know’. I want to link the acceptability of them talking about this, of the social and physical differences between the Lucy/attackers and David/Melanie relationships, and the role of the country in the development of those relationships. Very big and ambiguous, too many themes, and vague, but i’m working on it.

The same for Oscar Wao. The idea that the typical Dominican male is sexually promiscuous, or at least has many female conquests, is very important to the book… I want to explore what that means for women in comparison. Rape in the DR seems as tolerated by women as it is in South Africa. Beli disregards Lola’s complaint of rape as a child in comparison to what she considers worse troubles; La Inca sees her daughter’s post-pubescent body and wonders why ‘God gave you that burden in this country’. Lola, exploring sex in the DR, says ‘One thing you can count on in Santo Domingo. Not the lights, not the law. Sex. That never goes away.’ Sex, willing or unwilling, is as heavy a thread in Oscar Wao as it is in Disgrace, and it unites through the family as it does through the nation.

My quotes werent exact… they were more like paraphrases, which is why i didnt put page numbers. Still thinking it through, though.

Disgrace

So we start this book with a picture of David Lurie’s sex life. I’ve had to read Coetzee once before, so the idea of a sexual old man with a taste for exotics didn’t disturb me as much as it probably should have. The first few pages flew by, and I was on to his stalker/pedophilic tendencies. Again, not quite a shock. I was still  trying to stay objective when in walks Melanie, the spineless child. We were talking in class about whether she’s spineless or just intimidated by her professor; I think it’s a combination of both. The fact that she can’t seem to say “no” to Lurie flat out, only “not now” suggests that she’s never really said no to someone in her life. The presence of her boyfriend in class doesn’t bolster her strength or lend her courage to speak to Lurie, but rather diminishes her even farther. I think Melanie is one of those girls who tends to cling to a man stronger than she is with the idea that he’ll take care of her. It’s really all speculation, but this is the only kind of girl I can see reasonably getting into this situation with Lurie. One that will instinctively do anything before saying ‘no’, that will accept any fate she earns before having to admit that she’s gotten herself into something she can’t handle. Skipping ahead, this made Lurie’s imagining of her family filing the compaint, rather than her, much more acceptable.

We were also talking about the scene on pages 24-5, wondering about Melanie’s reactions and Lurie’s motives. I do still think it’s rape, but I’ve been thinking more about Lurie’s side of it. When he first meets her and they have dinner, at the end, on page 16, Lurie asks her to stay the night. It’s clear throughout the ‘date’ that she’s not smitten with him, but she doesnt’ give a concise ‘no’. She says ’why?’. Again, I really think this girl just has a problem saying ‘no’, but Lurie’s response was interesting. He says she ‘ought to’. That “a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.” If David Lurie’s view of women is that they exist to share their virtues, then to a like mind his taking advantage of Melanie isn’t wrong at all. It’s his duty to appreciate what she brings into the world. Melanie’s own opinion wouldn’t matter; how it affected her wouldn’t matter. Only the physical would matter, and so far as the physical goes, it was the “slender hips of a twelve year old” versus those of a fifty-two year old man who towered over her. Perhaps it was gratifying sex for him, but his size added to her own, as well as her temperament, the fact that he was her professor, with more than just physical power on his side, and the fact that Lurie never does see what he’s done as wrong though the drastic and negative changes in Melanie all speak to the obvious, all point in the direction of rape. As of page 58, with Lurie’s complete refusal to even remotely apologize (not that it would matter, the damage already done), I understand his mindset, but I’m still ready to sit back and watch him deserve every bad thing that comes his way.

On a completely different note… you really have to hand it to Coetzee. Man’s brilliant.

next reading…

For this post, I just want to talk a bit about Alice’s relationship with Ned, and how it kind of works as an example for the basis of every relationship in this book.

On page 239, when Alice is talking with Clare, she reveals that she was planning on leaving Ned before he died. “I’d made up my mind,” she says. “I was thinking about how to tell him, and then he dropped over dead on his way to the mailbox… I kept thinking, ‘if I leave, this won’t be my kitchen anymore. I won’t have my plates stacked in this corner cupboard, or light coming in at just this angle’… I couldn’t seem to relinquish… those little daily things. And then it would be time to make dinner, and another day would end.”

We know from Alice’s previous narrations that all was not well in Ned-and-Alice land to begin with, but I think it was just impressed upon us with a sad, regretful undertone… like it was more something Alice could mourn but not ever quite change herself. After Ned’s death, it comes screaming out and waving its arms around: Alice stayed with Ned because she couldn’t imagine living her life any other way than she’d started off. Like a tree, she grew roots, and like a tree, she was stuck living exactly where she was, no hope for change. She was comfortable in the familiarity of her life, too comfortable at any given moment to recognize the changes she needed to make for happiness. Ned’s death forces her hand, forces that change, and it’s something she finds she isn’t ready for. She doesn’t know how to be alone, to be without a husband, without someone to cook for and clean for and take care of.

Clare says on page 243 that she was laughing “at Alice, stuck in a fake house in the desert because she couldn’t imagine a life without a corner cupboard.” She laughs at things in her own life as well, at Bobby, at Jon, at herself, but I think it’s important that the last person she chooses to describe is Alice. We’ve drawn parallels between them in class and I think this comfort that drove Alice to stay, to not break that status quo, is the same motivator for Clare’s own trouble in an opposite sense. Clare is with Jon because it’s comfortable and they love each other minus the sex. She’s with Bobby because they’re in love plus the sex. But these two loves aren’t big romantic affairs; they’re small and only unreasonably because they’re two-sided: they all love one another at the same time. Clare wanted a baby, but gets cold feet because “I’m not this unusual, it’s just my hair.” She doesn’t want to be crazy, she wants to be comfortable. Three adults raising a baby isn’t comfortable. She wants to be in contrl of her own life (like Alice finds herself fearing now that she can be), and sharing a baby isn’t easy.

Jonathan tells Clare to be brave, and I think that’s the best bit of advice he could give any character in this novel. Comfort doesn’t require bravery, but a real, worthy life does at some point.

lines that jumped out…

We pretty much covered part 1 in class, so I’ll skip ahead to what I read so far of part 2.

The first lines I want to bring up were on page 109, first paragraph: “Because we were not lovers in the fleshly sense we had no use for the little murders.” Jon and Clare have this self-professed “half-lover” kind of relationship that’s not romantic at all, but rather solidly assured and safe. (quick sidenote: I liked the description of the two as old-fashioned sisters particularly because I’m taking a Jane Austen class as well this semester, and it was almost too easy to switch the characters out for a bizzare kind of ‘A Home at the End of Pride and Prejudice’) Their relationship is what they live for, I think, especially for Clare, who gets afraid when Jon first meets Erich. They exist like a married couple might, but without all the trouble that comes with a real romantic relationship.  On the back of the book, the summary talks about how the three – Bobby, Jon, and Clare – end up living together with a child. I wondered where Jon came in, if Bobby and Clare are the two to fall in love, but I’m starting to guess now that the three stay together simply because Jon and Clare don’t want to let real love – something she thinks she’ll never have – get in the way of the relationship they’ve worked so hard to preserve.

There was also a line on 110 that caught my eye: “Like a survivor of a war, who still wears heels and lipstick to walk among the wreckage.” Clare has been through very much in her youth, and in this line I can just see her stumbling along a darkened city street in her red kimono with matching heels, red lipstick, and this dazed, disillusioned look in her eyes that keeps most passerby at a clear distance as she passes. I like the visual, especially because it gives a real picture of Clare and the duality of her self-reliance and codependence.

And finally, another few… page 122, “And now, for the first time, I wanted to hold something apart… I disliked being asked to give my feelings a name. I may have feared that in describing them so early I’d sap them of their potential for growth or change. I may have been right. But I chose that night not to cultivate secrets… I shared with Clare. She was my main love in the world. I had no other attachment half so profound.”   These two paragraphs pretty much lay out Jon’s dedication to Clare at the same time as explore his inability to be truly open with anyone else without seriously overthinking and agonizing over it.

family (n) :

If I’d written the dictionary, the meaning of ‘family’ would pop up on the miriam-webster site with two of those cool old-fashioned sketches: one of me with my sister and parents at a picnic table in the mountains, and another of me with my roommate, my RA, and a few other people I’ve come to consider my family at strose.

Family means something different to everyone, which we began to see in class. Personally, I think family is very important. I don’t think it matters if the people you consider your family are blood-related to you, if they live in the same state, or even the same country. Family should ultimately be something that loves and comforts you unconditionally. It should be a solid support system, people you can always turn to and never feel embarrassed or ashamed to run to for help. My family consists of more than a few people, and I’d lay my life down for each and every one of them without hesitation.

One of my friends had a very hard time with her parents growing up. They didn’t accept her career choice, her orientation, or, later on, the individual she wanted to marry. They caused her a significant amount of grief, not because she wished she’d been different for them, but because all she’d ever wanted was for them to appreciate the person they’d raised. She couldn’t understand why her ‘own family’ wouldn’t accept her. At her bridal shower, which her parents didn’t attend, part of the toast she gave summed up perfectly what I feel family is: “My family can’t be here tonight, but… you know what, that was wrong. That was really f-ing wrong. My parents couldn’t be here tonight. My parents will never f-ing be here, but you guys? You’re always around. You’ve always been there for me, for everything. You’re here. My family is here. And I love you for it, each and every one of you.”

Family isn’t what you’re born with, its what you make and tend. That, I think, is the one of the most important things we can understand in this life.

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