The Fiction of Sexual Violence, pt. 3: Coetzee

In the previous two installments of this series on the fiction of sexual violence, I reflected, first, on the disabling dehumanization that is pictured in Toni Morrison's Beloved.  Next, I traced how sexual aggression creates dysfunctional and disfigured relationships in William Faulkner's Light in August.  In this post, I want to make some initial soundings into one instance of potential sexual assault in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace.

This novel is the most complex of the three in its representations of sexual violence, and this is the reason I say "initial soundings."  I cannot here say everything I would like to say -- and that the novel invites, and deserves, to be said.

And I say "potential sexual assault," because the brilliance of Coetzee's narrative is the way in which he adroitly, and realistically, captures the ambiguities that attend instances of alleged date rape on college campuses.  Of course, David Lurie is Melanie Isaacs' professor, which adds moral entanglements to this coupling.

By focusing on a scene early in the story, I suggest that Coetzee narrates a fiction of sexual violence:  one the one hand, a story about a questionable rape; on the other hand, the alleged assault also creates deathly distance between the characters.  The relationship between Lurie and Melanie is not a given; it is made.  It is, in this sense, a fiction.  Of what the relationship is made is precisely the question that carries through a major strain of the story's conflict.

David Lurie’s controversial sexual episode with Melanie Isaacs in Coetzee’s Disgrace strikingly echoes elements of the Joe Christmas/Joanna Burden sequence in Faulkner's Light in August.  There is some resistance, but it quickly seems to morph into assistance, which gives way to lifelessness and aversion.  Christmas “does not desist,” and “nothing will stop” Lurie.

He has given her no warning; she is too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her. When he takes her in his arms, her limbs crumple like a marionette’s.  Words heavy as clubs thud into the delicate whorl of the ear. ‘No, not now!’ she says, struggling.  ‘My cousin will be back!’

            But nothing will stop him.  …

            She does not resist.  All she does is avert herself:  avert her lips, avert her eyes.  She lets him lay her out on the bed and undress her:  she even helps him, raising her arms and then her hips. Little shivers of cold run through her; as soon as she is bare, she slips under the quilted counterpane like a mole burrowing, and turns her back on him.

            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 ... So that everything to her might be done, as it were, far away.  (Coetzee, 24-25)

Hear the echoes of the scene with Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden in Light in August:  "She did not resist at all.  It was almost as though she were helping him, with small changes of position of limbs when the ultimate need for help arose.  But beneath his hands the body might have been the body of a dead woman not yet stiffened" (Faulkner, 236).

If Beloved depicts the dehumanization of rape, and if Light in August reveals the relational dysfunction amid identity confusion that stems from sexual aggression, with Lurie in Disgrace we sense, to be sure, the ambiguity of rape (what is "rape"? has it occurred?), but also its lethality.

Melanie “crumples like a marionette,” as lifeless as a puppet.  “Little shivers of cold run through her,” as in pre-rigor mortis.  The experience is like dying.  Although Lurie is “the intruder who thrusts himself upon her” and “clubs” her with his words, Melanie is the one who “decided to go slack.”  She chooses to “die within herself for the duration.”  In this sense she is active, because in the other, crucial sense she is passive:  everything is done to her as victim.

King Karl Gustav (R) presents the 2003 Nobel Prize to Coetzee (L)

But this is not how Coetzee’s writes it:  “So that everything to her might be done, as it were, far away.”  Coetzee’s diction accents how the assault will seem in the moment to her, from her perspective.  What "she does is avert herself."  Hence she chooses a way to experience it:  like a temporary death.

Is this death-like distancing merely temporary?  The narrator never says.  Lucy never confronts David directly.  And readers are not privy to the written complaint she files with the university or to its originating source.  (David speculates that she was pressured into the complaint by her belligerent boyfriend or appalled father, and that eventually -- note the familiar verb -- she "crumpled in the end;" see 45.)  Subsequent to this sexual episode, Melanie appears at Lurie’s apartment and engages him in his office.  However, for the rest of the novel we see her little, and her voice is just as the narrator describes it in David’s office, “so subdued that he can barely hear” (34).  She has largely disappeared.

J. M. Coetzee (photo: M. Kubik, June 7, 2006)

Indeed, Melanie’s puzzled thought when Lurie addresses her in his office, teacher-to-student, about her attendance and work reflects the isolation she feels:  “You have cut me off from everyone” (34).  Like Lucy later after her albeit very different and unmistakable rape, Melanie, it seems, “would rather hide her face … Because of the disgrace.  Because of the shame” (115).  David recognizes the reason for Lucy’s feelings after her sexual violation but, significantly, not Melanie’s.

What first appeared as Melanie’s chosen way to endure the undesired sex, metaphorically to die inwardly so that the trauma would seem remote, now seems no longer metaphorical but actual. Sexual intimacy of this or any sort is relationally transformative: “I am no longer just a student,” she exclaims to herself.  Her relationship to Lurie the professor is not a given; it is fabricated.  It is not falsified but converted when Lurie "became a servant of Eros" (52).  It takes a different shape.

The insidiousness of sexual assault is this:  the relational transformation that ought to occur through sexual congress, a physical and emotional uniting of two individuals, does not happen.  Instead, the resulting relationship is less transformed than deformed.  The holistic union that ought to endure after the physical coupling fails; the special status of one’s sexual partner is not recognized (much less embraced); and isolation ensues.

This is not unlike Lucy’s declaration to David, “I am a dead person and I do not know yet what will bring me back to life” (161).   With sexual assault, the physical act that is supposed to be relationally unifying and life-giving is, instead, for the victim relationally destructive and life-taking.   Intimacy bows to isolation.