Write an article

4: Disgrace and the Neighbor:
An Interchange with Bill McDonald

Kenneth Reinhard

IN HIS ESSAY, “‘IS IT TO LATE TO EDUCATE THE EYE?’: David Lurie, Richard of St. Victor, and ‘vision as eros’ in Disgrace,” Bill McDonald is primarily
concerned with the nature of erotic vision in Coetzee’s novel, and the pos-
sibilities — and limitations — of the redemption that vision represents. The
central character in Disgrace, David Lurie, is a literary critic, and McDonald
has taken seriously the account we are given of Lurie’s main scholarly
works, in particular, his monograph on the twelfth-century Christian mys-
tic, Richard of St. Victor. McDonald shows how this work, as well as Lurie’s
books on Boito’s opera Mefistofele and Wordsworth’s sense of history,
informs the development of Lurie’s character, as well as Coetzee’s novel on
a more structural level. McDonald describes the transformation of Lurie’s
“disgrace” into a kind of “grace,” parallel with, as McDonald writes, “the
contemplative, ascetic spirit” if not the precise stages of the soul’s journey
to redemption described in Richard’s writings. Coetzee’s novel, however,
works in a modernist or perhaps postmodernist mode, with an ambiguous
conclusion — ironic, ambivalent, indeed, according to McDonald, incon-
clusive. Although he does not discuss in detail the surprisingly harsh criti-
cism Disgrace has received for the various perspectives on post-apartheid
South Africa that some readers have attributed to it, McDonald makes it
clear that the novel’s politics must not be understood as either an independ-
ent issue or as an allegorical counterpart to the various sexual relationships
presented in it. Rather, the politics of Coetzee’s novel are intrinsically
erotic. No “vision” that the novel may present for the future of South Africa
can be separated from the varieties of violent sexual experience it represents
or imagines, from seduction and rape to prostitution and adultery.
Moreover, McDonald shows how this violence is not merely understood as
associated with sexuality, as we might expect, but with love; such “violent
love” may not only be inevitable in the traumatized landscape of South
Africa, it may be the very condition of salvation. As McDonald indicates,
such an account of love’s salutary violence is central to Richard of St.
Victor’s thinking, especially in his Four Degrees of Violent Charity, as is evi-
dent from its title (“charity” of course is the translation of caritas, the Latin
version of agape, used by early Christianity to signify non-erotic modes of

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700.
Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:16:47.

C
op

yr
ig

ht
©

2
00

9.
B

oy
de

ll
&

B
re

w
er

. A
ll

rig
ht

s
re

se
rv

ed
.

94 ! KENNETH REINHARD

love). McDonald’s reading does not condemn Coetzee for the violence of
his representations of eros, but sees that whatever political vision the novel
may have must be understood as not incidentally but necessarily, and even
redemptively, bound up with that violence.

I have two sets of related questions and comments about Bill
McDonald’s reading of Disgrace, both of which ultimately involve the role
of Richard of St. Victor’s writings in the novel. The first has to do with the
nature of vision in the novel, and the possibilities of redemption that may
or may not be available through it; the second has to do with the nature
of social relations between people who are neither friends nor enemies, the
question of the neighbor in the novel. Both vision and the neighbor are,
finally, bound up with love in Richard of St. Victor’s writings and Coetzee’s
novel. And for both Richard and Coetzee, love implies a certain violence
that cannot remain merely contemplative.

First, what are the redemptive possibilities and limitations of vision?
For Richard of St. Victor, in the tradition of the Pseudo-Dionysius and
earlier Neoplatonism, contemplative “vision” is a spiritual tool that har-
nesses erotic drives for the purpose of mystical union with God. In St.
Augustine’s distinction, it is for the goal of the enjoyment (frui) of its
object rather than instrumental “use” (uti) — an enjoyment that is for its
own sake and, finally, only completely realized in the form of enjoyment of
God.1 For David Lurie in Disgrace, vision is not only the primary conduit
for his sexual attractions but, as McDonald points out, the rhetorical lure
that he uses to seduce Melanie Isaacs in (and out of) his literature class, in
tendentious figures such as his description of poetry as a “flash of revela-
tion and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love” (13).
Lurie’s question, which is taken up by McDonald, “is it too late to educate
the eye?” could be reformulated as the question of whether Lurie can find
in his own personal and intellectual history the resources to transform his
erotic “use” of the object of vision into something closer to Augustine’s
notion of enjoyment. McDonald writes, “It is above all in his visionary life
. . . that David achieves a measure of self-knowledge and aesthetic break-
through that culminate in loving ethical action.” The three central visions
that McDonald describes in the novel — Lurie’s “re-envisioning” of his
opera; the stream of images of women from his past during Melanie’s play;
and, at the end of the novel, Lurie’s vision of his daughter Lucy and the
possibility of a new life — all point to what McDonald calls “an ethic that
resituates desire in full recognition of the other.”

My first question is not only whether or not it is indeed “too late” for
David Lurie to redeem his vision, to transform it from sexual “use” to
higher “enjoyment,” for the sake of self-knowledge and ethical action, but
whether it is possible at all. That is, can a transformation of the nature of
vision — whether erotic, intellectual, or spiritual — constitute ethical
transformation? Does it have such resources in the novel or is it fundamen-

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700.
Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:16:47.

C
op

yr
ig

ht
©

2
00

9.
B

oy
de

ll
&

B
re

w
er

. A
ll

rig
ht

s
re

se
rv

ed
.

DISGRACE AND THE NEIGHBOR ! 95

tally limited, bound up with a model of knowledge that remains spectato-
rial (and even specular) and without either sufficient passivity or activity to
be transformative? And even if a certain possibility of subjective change
were available to David Lurie by means of vision, would it really have any
significance for political change in South Africa? Insofar as Lurie is the
central character and consciousness of the novel, we might expect the
question of whether or not his personal disgrace can lead to any kind of
redemptive grace to be key to the novel’s ethical or political significance.
Indeed, I would argue that Lurie’s personal path of penance as the loving
Angel of Death for abandoned animals is merely personal — rather than an
act meant to transform the world he lives in, it merely serves to change his
relationship to that world. Finally, Lurie’s subjective transformation, such
as it is, is not what the novel — or the reader — really cares about. Lurie
is a dead end, the last of a line. His grandchild will not be his, will not
transmit his culture or values, but will be part of something completely
unknowable and absolutely independent of him. I think it is clear that the
character of David Lurie changes to a certain extent over the novel, at least
in terms of his erotic objects; although he continues to frequent prostitutes
when inclined, he also has had a less illicit and pathetic, if still not quite
legitimate, relationship with a (married) woman of his own age, Bev, and
we are inclined to doubt that there will be many more Melanies in his life.
But all David has ever gained from relationships is “self-knowledge” as a
mode of intellectual narcissism and that is all that he seems to achieve by
the end of the book. It is fine for David to accomplish some measure of
understanding of himself, but such knowledge is not the same as transfor-
mation, and may not be an indication of real change — either on a per-
sonal or on a political level. Indeed, it may be an impediment to change,
an imaginary screen against a vision that David cannot face. “Love of the
neighbor,” we should recall, is not predicated on or conditioned by self-
knowledge, but self-love — and “love” must be taken, as both Richard of
St. Victor and Freud do, as intrinsically violent, ambivalent, and potentially
not only self-transformative, but transformative of a world. As McDonald
indicates, David Lurie’s characteristic vision at the beginning is erotic in a
detached, analytic mode; vision as sexual knowledge, we might say,
whether in evaluating his regular prostitute Soraya or Melanie, the young
student on whom he fixes his eye. Vision is the first moment of sexual
penetration for Lurie, and the end is possession, consumption, and finally
evacuation of the object. This kind of erotic vision is fully parallel with
Lurie’s literary critical methodology, which is again more about self-
knowledge than knowledge of something outside of himself, something
truly other. Lurie’s sexual and critical vision are both, we might say,
“jaded”: he sees merely what he has already seen, and there is nothing new
under the sun, merely variations on a theme (whether poetic, musical, or
feminine).

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700.
Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:16:47.

C
op

yr
ig

ht
©

2
00

9.
B

oy
de

ll
&

B
re

w
er

. A
ll

rig
ht

s
re

se
rv

ed
.

96 ! KENNETH REINHARD

The first of the three visions that McDonald describes in the novel
centers on David Lurie’s opera on Byron and Teresa Guiccioli; as
McDonald indicates, Lurie finds himself surprised by his own rewriting of
Teresa, who comes to resemble the middle-aged Bev, a comic figure, rather
than the sort of suggestible younger woman that is his usual fare. Whereas
Lurie had originally planned to “borrow” the melodies for his opera from
a composer such as Gluck, this revised Teresa now acts as his muse for the
composition of a simple, folk-based but original score. For McDonald, this
transformation of Teresa-as-Bev represents Lurie moving “beyond the
narcissism” that had prevented him from being open to something truly
other than himself. Nevertheless, as McDonald also writes, “she becomes
his guide to a new purpose, and a new self-understanding.” However, I
wonder if Lurie’s “self-understanding” is anything more than that: self-
understanding, a more intellectualized mode of his fundamental narcis-
sism? Is he not a character who, in this scene of re-visionary understanding
and the similar scenes that follow, merely comes to reflect more deeply on
himself? Do his visions ever show him anything other than himself, that is,
any other human being? Indeed, even his work at the animal shelter and
crematorium does not directly involve him with other people; it is as if he
does it for the sake of seeing himself as charitable, as relating to and offer-
ing loving service to another creature, even in a mode as violent as provid-
ing the mercy of an easy death to an unwanted animal.

The second sequence of Lurie’s visions remains just as solipsistic. In
his reading of the scene where David watches Melanie acting in Sunset at
the Globe Salon, McDonald argues that “David’s eye has been educated by
his reflections,” and he no longer sees Melanie as an object of sexual desire,
but more as “a surrogate daughter whose excellent performance he wishes
to take pride in.” This leads to a visionary sequence in which Lurie sud-
denly is flooded with “images of women he has known on two conti-
nents,” the women he has slept with and, sometimes, loved. McDonald
understands this image as “an empathetic rather than narcissistic upwelling”;
and even though he points to the irony in Lurie describing the women as
having all “enriched” him, using the same infelicitous word that he had
earlier used to justify his relationship with Melanie, McDonald neverthe-
less regards this sequence of visions as representative of authentic ethical
or spiritual progress, along the lines of the path described by Richard of St.
Victor. But once again it is simply Lurie himself who is the focus of this
“enrichment”: the women swirling in his vision like leaves, “a fair field of
folk” as Lurie puts it, quoting Piers Plowman and alluding to a tradition of
such visions in Homer, Dante, and elsewhere, are dancing on his private
stage, as supporting actresses or foils for, again, his self-discovery. Once
again, vision is a path of development, but one that has little to do with
the encounter with other people; once again Lurie is working out his own
psychodrama in a vision that is hardly his own, but borrowed from other

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700.
Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:16:47.

C
op

yr
ig

ht
©

2
00

9.
B

oy
de

ll
&

B
re

w
er

. A
ll

rig
ht

s
re

se
rv

ed
.

DISGRACE AND THE NEIGHBOR ! 97

writers and artists. Indeed, McDonald agrees that the vision has “limited
impact . . . on David’s action,” insofar as, upon leaving the theater, he
comes across a pathetic, drugged-out prostitute, even younger than
Melanie, and has sex with her. McDonald writes, “Plainly, even violently,
Coetzee refuses any idealization of David’s vision; by itself it is not enough.
But it may clear the ground for a more important new beginning with his
flesh and blood daughter, Lucy.”

There is little indication, however, that David Lurie’s increasing self-
knowledge, as demonstrated by this sequence of visions, has any conse-
quences beyond, well, self-knowledge. Has he become more ethical? Has
he changed in other than purely subjective ways? And even if his self-
reflection has indeed transformed his sense of himself, should we care? Is
Coetzee and the novel really very interested in David Lurie’s personal
transformation or lack thereof? Perhaps; but I believe that Lurie is some-
thing of a “lure” in the novel, a red herring that leads the unwary reader
into the trap of identification and the illusory assumption that a change of
vision is the same as a vision of change. We are likely to regard Lurie as
debauched or at least foolish and strangely self-destructive at the begin-
ning of the novel; but are not his attempts to connect with his estranged
and damaged daughter, his relationship with Bev, and his growing care for
abandoned animals, all presented to us as invitations to empathize and
even identify with him? There is no doubt that he has been “enriched” as
a character by these developments, but if we are satisfied by these signs of
his ethical growth, aren’t we also tacitly endorsing his unrepentant claim
that he has “enriched” Melanie by seducing her? And further, doesn’t this
slippery slope become even more unstable when we realize that such a
claim could similarly be made by Lucy’s rapists, if they were as educated as
Lurie — that they were merely “enriching” her? To understand the ques-
tion of his development as an ethical individual or as a literary character as
being central to the novel’s mythos and ethos is to remain within a para-
digm of subjectivity and responsibility that may not operate in the new
South Africa. David Lurie, I believe, will be left out of whatever brave new
world it is that Lucy’s child will be born into.2

The third vision that McDonald describes involves a painterly scene of
David watching his pregnant daughter, Lucy, working in her fields. Here
Lurie seems to accept Lucy’s decision to keep the child and to marry
Petrus, even accepting the fact that she will become a member of the same
family as the men who raped her. Lurie sees himself as the grandfather of
a new lineage that will derive from the birth, and convert its violent origins
into a new beginning, a new race mixing whites and blacks in South Africa
— even if his contribution to it will quickly dwindle and likely be forgot-
ten. So what do we make of Lurie’s vision of his daughter as a figure in a
painting, “a Sargent or Bonnard”? No longer does he see her in more or
less erotic terms, but as something more aestheticized and allegorical, “the

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700.
Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:16:47.

C
op

yr
ig

ht
©

2
00

9.
B

oy
de

ll
&

B
re

w
er

. A
ll

rig
ht

s
re

se
rv

ed
.

98 ! KENNETH REINHARD

eternal feminine” as he puts it, a sort of earth mother, or Principle of
Generation. “The truth is,” Coetzee writes, Lurie “has never had much of
an eye for rural life, despite all his reading of Wordsworth. Not much of an
eye for anything, except pretty girls; and where has that got him? Is it too
late to educate the eye?” (218). I think that we must take this as a real
question, not merely rhetorical; and I am inclined to respond, Yes — it is
too late for David Lurie, but for Lucy, her child, and South Africa, and
finally for us, the book’s readers, the question of David’s vision must be
subordinated to larger questions and concerns. In contemplating the scene
of the pregnant Lucy working in the fields, “becoming a peasant,” David
sees her world as a painting, a study in color and light, figure and ground;
he may not have had much of an eye for rural life, but with his daughter
at the center, allegorized and redeemed, he is happy to compose a pretty
picture of the future. And what about Lucy in this painterly scene? Is she
gazing into a brave new post-apartheid world on the horizon? No; she is
absorbed in the world in which she is living and working; she is making a
world, not painting one. After having watched his daughter from a dis-
tance, and self-consciously composing her as the subject of a painting,
Lurie finally breaks the “spell” he had cast by calling out to Lucy, and she
replies, surprised, “I didn’t hear you”; but she might have said, I didn’t see
you. And as if to suggest just this, the narrator remarks that Lucy’s dog,
Katy, “stares shortsightedly in his [Lurie’s] direction” (218). There is no
real place of significance for Lurie in Lucy’s future, in the future of South
Africa; she simply can’t see him. But more that this, she does not “see” in
a visionary sense at all: she is not a subject who imagines possible futures,
but she is fully caught up in the activities of making. And this may involve
a certain degree of willful blindness, both to the terrible past and to the
uncertain future.

The world that David Lurie gazes upon is what Heidegger calls a
“world picture,” an aestheticized and allegorically pre-interpreted image.3
It is true that he is not “in the picture,” but no matter: he is the artist who
has set up the picture and the subject for whom it is composed. For David,
vision always means seeing himself seeing: ultimately, whatever the object,
his vision is always for the sake of establishing himself as Seer. Lucy and her
offspring will always remain no more than an image for his eye, a moral for
his story, rather than fellow creatures with whom he may share a history
and a world. But this suggests another reading of the question “is it too
late to educate the eye?”: David’s eye and his consciousness dominate the
novel, and finally there is no redemption available for him. But it is perhaps
not too late to educate the reader’s eye, and this involves precisely breaking
with the perspective determined by Lurie, realizing that it is not exemplary
but a visual “lure,” the lure, precisely, of the visual. Finally, vision by itself,
no matter how redeemed or transfigured, no matter how spiritually or
historically informed, is not adequate to the requirements of a new South

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700.
Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:16:47.

C
op

yr
ig

ht
©

2
00

9.
B

oy
de

ll
&

B
re

w
er

. A
ll

rig
ht

s
re

se
rv

ed
.

DISGRACE AND THE NEIGHBOR ! 99

Africa; it is the visual opposition of “black” and “white,” after all, that was
the basis of apartheid’s regime. To build a new world, or to bring some-
thing radically new into the world (a child?), what is required is not vision
or knowledge, but, I would like to suggest, love, which, after all, is blind.

My second set of comments, which are connected with the first, have
to do with McDonald’s remarks on social love in the novel and on Richard
of St. Victor’s notion of condilectio and “violent love.” McDonald
describes Richard’s account of the mystical journey as “a path that empha-
sizes relationships with others and the importance of full community
where love may be enacted.” What Richard calls condilectio, “shared love,”
or neighbor love, implies the need for a third party who, as a common
object of love for two others, allows their love to achieve a more perfect
union without solipsism. Just as the trinitarian account of God requires a
triple unity of poles within the Godhead so that God can reflect on himself
by means of a mediating element, and in turn be fully loving, so human
relations need a third person in order to avoid specular dualism and to
transform love from a private to a social affect.

In French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s terms, condilectio would be
the love that breaks through the tendency to “imaginary” insularity for the
sake of a more authentically “symbolic” relationship, one based on differ-
ence and mediation rather than the immediacy of fusion. But for Lacan,
neighbor love ultimately aims at something else, a third element, neither
imaginary nor symbolic, but real. The neighbor as “real” implies the trau-
matic alterity that the other embodies or includes within him or herself, as
an “intimate exteriority” — the unfathomable desire of the other that is
more fundamental to the subject than its sense of self. For Lacan, “to love
our neighbor as our self” is to encounter what is most singularly strange
and disturbing in the other person, what is most rageful, perverse, or dis-
gusting, and unknowable, not available for empathy, not recognizable —
yet to acknowledge that dark abyss as the figure of our own unconscious
desire. In his seminar from 1959–60, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan
distinguishes the easy gestures of a “philanthropy,” the charity (if not
caritas) that imagines the other’s desires and needs on the model of one’s
own, from a more radical possibility of loving the neighbor. Lacan draws
on the example of the fourth-century bishop, Saint Martin of Tours, who
famously shares his cloak with a naked beggar he happens upon, as a
negative exemplum of neighbor love, beyond the ethics of the Good:

As long as it’s a question of the good, there no problem; our own and
our neighbor’s are of the same material. Saint Martin shares his cloak, and
a great deal is made of it. Yet it is after all a simple question of training;
material is by its very nature made to be disposed of — it belongs to the
other as much as it belongs to me. We are no doubt touching a primitive
requirement in the need to be satisfied there, for the beggar is naked. But
perhaps over and above that need to be clothed, he was begging for

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700.
Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:16:47.

C
op

yr
ig

ht
©

2
00

9.
B

oy
de

ll
&

B
re

w
er

. A
ll

rig
ht

s
re

se
rv

ed
.

100 ! KENNETH REINHARD

something else, namely that Saint Martin kill him or fuck him. In any
encounter there’s a big difference in meaning between the response of
philanthropy and that of love.4

Lacan’s critique of Saint Martin’s gesture, as characteristic of a certain
mode of ethical reason and moral utilitarianism, is that it remains at the
level of the other’s need, never touching on the question of desire — on
what the other is lacking on a more fundamental level. It is of course of
primary importance to recognize the purely animal requirements of every
human being — clothing, shelter, food, etc. — but the response to the
neighbor in terms of such needs does not require my encounter with what
is truly other in the other, and in that sense is not really what Lacan means
by ethical. In fact such a gesture risks acting as a screen designed precisely
to conceal from myself what might be disturbing in the other, what Lacan
calls the other’s jouissance: its strange, unfathomable “enjoyment,” intrin-
sically transgressive and singularly human, and profoundly more difficult
to address than animal needs. Lacan’s notion of the neighbor’s jouissance
is by no means identical with Richard of St. Victor’s Augustinian account
of condilectio as “enjoyment,” but in both cases the relationship to the
other is understood as non-instrumental, as an absolute end in itself, and
as addressed to something that exceeds my possibilities of vision or knowl-
edge and may in fact undermine my most fundamental self-certainties. The
love of the neighbor that Lacan goes on to describe in the acts of other
(women) saints involves incorporating the horror of the other: joyfully
eating the excrement of a sick man, drinking water in which a leper’s feet
had been washed, etc. These are not acts of “perversion” according to
Lacan, but on a fundamental level, acts of neighbor love, attempts to love
the other person not in spite of what is most horrific and vile in them, but
precisely for that horror, as the sign of their alterity, which is elevated to
the status of a sublime object.

Can we see Lucy’s response to her rape and impregnation as a version
of neighbor love? Is her willingness to marry Petrus and to merge her life
with those of her assailants a kind of loving-kindness that has nothing to
do with religious obligation or social necessity, but enacts a fully conscious
and self-willed decision? There is clearly no “identification with the aggres-
sor” going on here; Lucy does not see herself as “like” Petrus’s family, does
not make herself one of them, will clearly always remain outside, even
when she lives within Petrus’s walls and sleeps between his sheets. Indeed,
she does not will herself to see him as “my neighbor” — there is no act of
charity, no Christian self-abasement in her action. Can we even suggest
that her decision is a response to a call she has heard — a call not from
some transcendental source, but from the boys who have raped her, a reply
to their obscene, perverse, cruel acts of neighbor love?

In the post-apartheid South Africa of Disgrace, the relationship that
best describes the situation of blacks and whites is that of neighbors, with

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest
Ebook Central, …