Disgrace

Early in his career, Richard Burton was said by one critic to “carry around with him his own cathedral,” meaning that Burton’s resounding voice didn’t always require the best acoustics. He imposed limitless space on the most intimate theater. Great novels carry around with them their own universe, no matter the intimacy of the subject or range of chronology or geography. 

I found J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, published in 1999, somber but surprisingly moving and engaging. Perhaps because of my age, a decade older than David Lurie, the novel’s protagonist, but I felt the novel’s wider significance, as a kind of post-Apartheid personal reckoning, floated above the drama without bearing down on it too heavily or obviously. The journey David takes in the course of the story is one he brings on himself, but his gradual transformation, much more than merely a humbling, is all the more moving for not being so edifying. David changes in the course of the story, but there is nothing to reassure us that his life will be anything but an acceptance of loss. His experiences with Lucy, his daughter, effectively break David, so that by the end of the novel the only possible uplift was provided by Coetzee’s language.  

When we first meet David, he is an all-too-typical intellectual, someone for whom ideas and literary figures are at least as real as the living people he encounters in the practice of his profession. He teaches English Romantic poetry in Cape Town to what he considers a class of indifferent students. His contented life is disrupted when Soraya, the woman he turns to for sexual comfort, quits the profession and instead of simply asking for a replacement from her “agency” (at her suggestion) David decides quite egoistically to impress his urges on an attractive student named Melanie Isaacs. His actions bring about his professional fall from grace (his importunities are inopportune), forcing him to find a new direction in his life. 

As much as I knew about South Africa, while reading the novel my ignorance kept me slightly off-balance. Finding myself there, in relatively untouched Cape Town, among educated and prosperous South Africans (some former Germans, some English), it made me wonder if the English I was reading and hearing was being spoken in the South African accent that I’ve heard before in movies. A few, surprisingly few, Afrikaaner words are used in the text, but the protagonist is a university professor and scholar of English, and he uses his familiarity with classic literature both to protect him from what he considers the cultural decay around him and as a weapon in defense of his irresponsible cupidity. 

There is also, unavoidably, the subject of race. Coetzee occasionally fails to identify the race of some of the characters he introduces. For instance, he tells us that Soraya, Lurie’s regular call girl, is Muslim, that she is classified as “exotic” by her agency. We are left to assume that she is at least part African. But when the men appear in the climactic scene, Coetzee writes: “Three men are coming toward them on the path, or two men and a boy.” They are Africans, but Coetzee doesn’t tell us this directly. If nothing else, the film adapted from the novel, released in 2008, makes race a non-issue by making it manifestly clear – except there are a few surprises. Melanie Isaacs, whom I thought was white in the novel, is most definitely not in the film. 

In his overall positive review of the film Stanley Kauffmann wrote: “There is one element missing here from the film that would help. In the novel Lucy [David’s daughter] is a lesbian, whose partner is off somewhere for a while.” Kauffmann clearly missed some dialogue at the beginning of the film in which David tells Soraya: “I haven’t heard from my daughter.” “Still living with a woman?” “Yes. Still a lesbian.” And when David first arrives at Lucy’s house, he asks, “Where’s Helen?”” She’s in Johannesburg,” Lucy tells him. 

The narrator is third person, but it may as well be David since it tells us David’s thoughts but no one else’s. His is a supple, responsive intelligence: “At what age, he wonders, did Origen castrate himself? Not the most graceful of solutions, but then ageing is not a graceful business.” And since David is the locus of the film, dispensing with the narrator is no special loss. 

John Malkovich is David. I thought he was rather affected and mannered in some of his film roles. Here, even with the expected accent (which is just another affectation), I’m afraid that I was expecting more – more than he was able to give to the role, perhaps. He doesn’t upset the rest of the film, which is fine; but I found his performance disappointing, if only because Stanley Kauffmann called it “consummate.” 

Three other actors in the film, however, are all new to me and all splendid. Jessica Haines is wonderfully alive and responsive as Lucy. What she endures in the film (a gang rape and eventual pregnancy) is hard for David to fully comprehend, but the pain in Haines’s eyes is unmistakable. Antoinette Engel is taller than I expected as Melanie (in the novel she is “small and thin”), but she communicates vulnerability in the presence of David – which was likely what drew him to her. Both Haines and Engel are South African. Fiona Press, who is Australian (the film is an Australian production), is expressively present as Bev. 

Having just finished reading the novel last month, I found myself anticipating every scene as they came along. The film doesn’t try to expand on anything, but in the predictable process of transcribing the novel to the screen, the Australian director Steve Jacobs failed to supply me with a reason for doing it. I know of a few film adaptations of great novels that were more than serviceable, that at least made the word into flesh and illuminated the world that the novel portrays. The script was the work of Anna Maria Monticelli, who is married to the director. She mentioned how “It’s such a beautiful book, a great book actually, and I didn’t want to bastardise it. I didn’t want to change it in any way that would reinterpret things. It has this biblical kind of proportion to it, and a language that’s quite formal. I wanted to capture that.” Without bastardizing Coetzee’s novel, the film is guilty of a certain obviousness. Some scenes come off better than others, but some only approximate the force of the action in the novel. For instance, when David assists Bev with euthanizing the dogs, putting their corpses into plastic bags, driving them to an incinerator, and one by one pushing them into the fire, Coetzee made the whole ordeal immeasurably more moving (and I’m no dog lover). When, in the film, David has to pull off the road because he is overcome with emotion, the scene felt perfunctory and unmoving. 

The interior drama of David’s writing of the chamber opera about Lord Byron’s last mistress is entirely omitted. Also omitted is what could almost be regarded as the novel’s climax, when Lucy tells David, 

’I am determined to be a good mother, David. A good mother and a good person. You should try to be a good person too.'

'I suspect it is too late for me. I'm just an old lag serving out my sentence. But you go ahead. You are well on the way.' 

A good person. Not a bad resolution to make, in dark times.

The film changes the order of the last scenes: instead of ending at the animal shelter, it ends in the gentler penultimate scene in which David parks his truck on the hill above Lucy’s farm and walks down to her. 

In Wallace Stevens’s poem “Arrival at the Waldorf,” he writes of the strangeness of returning to a familiar world “After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.” In many ways, I was grateful to see the people and places to which the novel introduced me in their unarguable actuality in the film. The only element of David’s story that Coetzee couldn’t give us, that alien, point-blank, green and actual South Africa, is undeniably present in the film.