In many ways, Disgrace is a novel about a man who resists change. First of all, David has a strange relationship with the process of aging, which is evident in his fascination with sex. He uses sex as a way of maintaining his sense of youthfulness, ultimately trying to recapture his days as a handsome young ladies’ man. This tendency to live in the past also rears its head when he denounces the idea of self-improvement, refusing to go to counseling because he believes a person can’t change after a certain age. Similarly, he finds himself struggling to accept the new social and racial dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa when he moves in with Lucy. Having grown used to a system in which white men like himself are powerful and dominant, he finds himself challenged by the idea of submitting to black men like Petrus, who often have more cultural capital than he does in rural towns like the one Lucy inhabits. But just because he resists transformation doesn’t mean David doesn’t recognize that everything around him is changing—he’s aware that society no longer accords with the way he sees the world, but he makes no effort to adjust. And given that his many refusals to change lead to punishment, public humiliation, and a strain on his and Lucy’s relationship, it’s clear that Coetzee wants to illustrate the harmful effects of such an inflexible worldview.
For his entire life, David has always attracted women, something he came to take for granted. At the age of fifty-two, though, he finds himself incapable of getting the attention he used to. “Without warning his powers fled,” Coetzee notes. “Glances that would once have responded to his slid over, past, through him. Overnight he became a ghost.” The last sentence of this passage suggests that David feels suddenly pushed to the margins of life. Because he feels this way, Coetzee explains, he commits himself all the more to his sex life, which he apparently believes will help him feel young again. “He existed in an anxious flurry of promiscuity,” Coetzee writes. “He had affairs with the wives of colleagues; he picked up tourists in bars on the waterfront or at the Club Italia; he slept with whores.” Considering the fact that David sees “promiscuity” as a way of recapturing his youth, it’s not necessarily surprising that he pursues Melanie, a woman so young he doesn’t even know how to properly flirt with her. Coetzee emphasizes the extent to which David uses his sexual relationship with Melanie as a method of preserving his own sense of youthfulness—an attempt that demonstrates how reluctant he is to embrace change even when there’s nothing he can do to stop it.
When the disciplinary committee hints that David might be able to keep his job if he’s willing to undergo counseling, he doubles down on his refusal to embrace change. “I have not sought counselling nor do I intend to seek it,” he says. “I am a grown man. I am not receptive to being counselled. I am beyond the reach of counselling.” When he says this, he frames himself as someone unable to alter his ways, and gives himself an excuse to avoid reckoning with his own shortcomings, since counseling would certainly force him to face the implications of his bad behavior. By suggesting that he’s “beyond the reach of counselling,” then, he protects himself from ever having to change, though this only hurts him in the long run, since it leads to public disgrace and the end of his career.
The theme of change in the novel—which is set in contemporary South Africa— also relates to the country’s fraught transition from an apartheid system to a post-apartheid system of government. Between 1948 and 1994, South Africa used institutionalized racial segregation to subjugate black people, though the country’s white rulers were actually the minority population. After apartheid ended, race relations remained tense (and still do), and some black people began to target the country’s white minority. These tensions are alive in Disgrace, as David comes to Lucy’s farm to discover that a black man named Petrus who shares her land is slowly accruing more wealth and power than Lucy. Lucy, for her part, is fine with this and even helps Petrus expand what he has, but David is disconcerted by this setup. His worries, it seems, have to do with his hesitancy to adjust to post-apartheid life in rural South Africa, where whites no longer have unchecked power over others.
At first, David doesn’t act on his racist outlook, but he finds himself incapable of containing his rage when he discovers that Petrus knows Pollux, a boy who was one of Lucy’s three attackers. Surely, David has every right to be angry with this boy, but when he catches him staring at Lucy as she undresses, his rage bears traces of his racist and dated worldview. “Never has he felt such elemental rage,” Coetzee writes. “Phrases that all his life he has avoided seem suddenly just and right: Teach him a lesson, Show him his place.” In this moment, David allows his anger to mingle with his inability to accept South Africa’s new social order, ultimately weaponizing his resistance to change and using it as a further excuse to beat Pollux. Indeed, his frustration regarding his own fading power combines in this scene with his opposition to the vanishing dominance of white people in South Africa. Lucy, on the other hand, has no problem with the way their country has transformed itself, which is perhaps why she later chastises David for behaving so extremely. In fact, it is because of his violent reaction that Lucy finally asks him to move out of her farmhouse. As such, Coetzee shows readers how David’s resistance to change affects his life for the worse. What’s more, the fact that David achieves nothing by beating Pollux suggests that fighting against change is not only harmful to one’s own life, but completely futile, too.
Time and Change ThemeTracker
Time and Change Quotes in Disgrace
He has toyed with the idea of asking her to see him in her own time. He would like to spend an evening with her, perhaps even a whole night. But not the morning after. He knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.
That is his temperament. His temperament is not going to change, he is too old for that. His temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body.
Note that we are not asked to condemn this being with the mad heart, this being with whom there is some thing constitutionally wrong. On the contrary, we are invited to understand and sympathize. But there is a limit to sympathy. For though he lives among us, he is not one of us. He is exactly what he calls himself: a thing, that is, a monster. Finally, Byron will suggest, it will not be possible to love him, not in the deeper, more human sense of the word. He will be condemned to solitude.
Don’t expect sympathy from me, David, and don’t expect sympathy from anyone else either. No sympathy, no mercy, not in this day and age. Everyone’s hand will be against you, and why not? Really, how could you?
‘Very well. I took advantage of my position vis-à-vis Ms Isaacs. It was wrong, and I regret it. Is that good enough for you?’
‘The question is not whether it is good enough for me, Professor Lurie, the question is whether it is good enough for you. Does it reflect your sincere feelings?’
He shakes his head. ‘I have said the words for you, now you want more, you want me to demonstrate their sincerity. That is preposterous. That is beyond the scope of the law. I have had enough. Let us go back to playing it by the book. I plead guilty. That is as far as I am prepared to go.’
‘I’m dubious, Lucy. It sounds suspiciously like community service. It sounds like someone trying to make reparation for past misdeeds.’
‘As to your motives, David, I can assure you, the animals at the clinic won’t query them. They won’t ask and they won’t care.’
‘All right, I’ll do it. But only as long as I don’t have to become a better person. I am not prepared to be reformed. I want to go on being myself. I’ll do it on that basis.’
‘There was something so ignoble in the spectacle that I despaired. One can punish a dog, it seems to me, for an offence like chewing a slipper. A dog will accept the justice of that: a beating for a chewing. But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts.’
‘So males must be allowed to follow their instincts unchecked? Is that the moral?’
‘No, that is not the moral. What was ignoble about the Kenilworth spectacle was that the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature. It no longer needed to be beaten. It was ready to punish itself. At that point it would have been better to shoot it.’
She does not reply, and he does not press her, for the moment. But his thoughts go to the three intruders, the three invaders, men he will probably never lay eyes on again, yet forever part of his life now, and of his daughter’s. The men will watch the newspapers, listen to the gossip. They will read that they are being sought for robbery and assault and nothing else. It will dawn on them that over the body of the woman silence is being drawn like a blanket. Too ashamed, they will say to each other, too ashamed to tell, and they will chuckle luxuriously, recollecting their exploit. Is Lucy prepared to concede them that victory?
‘[…] Do you think what happened here was an exam: if you come through, you get a diploma and safe conduct into the future, or a sign to paint on the door-lintel that will make the plague pass you by? That is not how vengeance works, Lucy. Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets.’
‘Stop it, David! I don’t want to hear this talk of plagues and fires. I am not just trying to save my skin. If that is what you think, you miss the point entirely.’
‘Then help me. Is it some form of private salvation you are trying to work out? Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?’
‘No. You keep misreading me. Guilt and salvation are abstractions. I don’t act in terms of abstractions. Until you make an effort to see that, I can’t help you.’
‘[…] Petrus is not an innocent party, Petrus is with them.’
‘Don’t shout at me, David. This is my life. I am the one who has to live here. What happened to me is my business, mine alone, not yours, and if there is one right I have it is the right not to be put on trial like this, not to have to justify myself—not to you, not to anyone else. As for Petrus, he is not some hired labourer whom I can sack because in my opinion he is mixed up with the wrong people. That’s all gone, gone with the wind.’
Let me not forget this day, he tells himself, lying beside her when they are spent. After the sweet young flesh of Melanie Isaacs, this is what I have come to. This is what I will have to get used to, this and even less than this.
‘It’s late,’ says Bev Shaw. ‘I must be going.’
He pushes the blanket aside and gets up, making no effort to hide himself. Let her gaze her fill on her Romeo, he thinks, on his bowed shoulders and skinny shanks. It is indeed late. […] At the door Bev presses herself against him a last time, rests her head on his chest. He lets her do it, as he has let her do everything she has felt a need to do. His thoughts go to Emma Bovary strutting before the mirror after her first big afternoon. I have a lover! I have a lover! sings Emma to herself. Well, let poor Bev Shaw go home and do some singing too. And let him stop calling her poor Bev Shaw. If she is poor, he is bankrupt.
One word more, then I am finished. It could have turned out differently, I believe, between the two of us, despite our ages. But there was something I failed to supply, something’—he hunts for the word—‘lyrical. I lack the lyrical. I manage love too well. Even when I burn I don’t sing, if you understand me. For which I am sorry. I am sorry for what I took your daughter through. You have a wonderful family. I apologize for the grief I have caused you and Mrs Isaacs. I ask for your pardon.
‘So,’ says Isaacs, ‘at last you have apologized. I wondered when it was coming.’ He ponders. He has not taken his seat; now he begins to pace up and down. ‘You are sorry. You lacked the lyrical, you say. If you had had the lyrical, we would not be where we are today. But I say to myself, we are all sorry when we are found out. Then we are very sorry. The question is not, are we sorry? The question is, what lesson have we learned? The question is, what are we going to do now that we are sorry?’
‘I don’t trust him,’ he goes on. ‘He is shifty. He is like a jackal sniffing around, looking for mischief. In the old days we had a word for people like him. Deficient. Mentally deficient. Morally deficient. He should be in an institution.’
‘That is reckless talk, David. If you want to think like that, please keep it to yourself. Anyway, what you think of him is beside the point. He is here, he won’t disappear in a puff of smoke, he is a fact of life.’