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.

The Fiction of Sexual Violence, pt. 2: Faulkner

In the first part of this series on the fiction of sexual violence, I briefly explained the twin aspects of "fiction" according to which I will explore this theme.  I began with Toni Morrison's Beloved and a reading of the effects of Ella's experience as a sex slave (quite literally as a slave in the Antebellum South).  And I suggested that we see in her trauma how sexual violence both disables a person's capacity for love (both loving and being loved) and dehumanizes the person in the process.  In Faulkner’s Light in August, the sexual violence between Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden is different.

The Fiction of Sexual Violence, pt. 1: Morrison

This summer I (re)read a number of novels.  And I had some separate conversations about the nature and forms of sexual violence, particularly its less perspicuous manifestations in common settings.  I would like to draft some soundings -- initial probings, investigations, short essays -- on the connections between these two matters. And I hope to do so by drawing upon three novels in particular:  Toni Morrison's Beloved, William Faulkner's Light in August, and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace.

In a series of posts, then, I plan to explore the fiction of sexual violence.  I consciously borrow the phrase from Arnold Weinstein's critical study The Fiction of Relationship.  For him, there are "two fundamental notions" that the wording of his title expresses:  "(1) the narrative literature of relationship, and (2) the view that relationship may be a fiction, something made rather than given, built out of belief, not fact" (Weinstein, 3).  What interests me here is the intersection between stories about relationships, the ways in which those relationships are constructed, and the effects of varieties of unwanted sexual aggression.

Each post may stand on its own, but I anticipate that the each piece will contribute to a larger mosaic that both deepens and broadens our (or at least my) understanding of what is or is perceived as sexual violence, its effect on individuals discretely and collectively, and what all of this suggests about the narratives in which they occur and about the relational fictions of which they are constitutive.  I begin with Morrison's Beloved.