Love and Disgrace: Reading Coetzee

in the Light (and Love) of Barthes

Eric Meljac
Indiana University of Pennsylvania

When reading the final lines of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, at the point when David
Lurie gives up his dog to death, there comes a certain sense of mystery. Why would this
disgraced former college professor give up to death the only creature that appeared to show
him unconditional love? The scene is chilling in its way and is a challenge to the reader.
However, if read alongside Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, a certain sense can
be made of Lurie’s decision. Indeed, with Barthes in mind, Lurie’s decision to give up
the maimed dog to death is really an act of love — love of a certain kind, built in part on
Barthes’s notions of tenderness and delicacy.

Keywords: J.M. Coetzee / Roland Barthes / love / animals

The scene is like the Sentence: structurally, there is no obligation for it

to stop; no internal constraint exhausts it, because, as in the Sentence,
once the core is given (the fact, the decision), the expansions are infi-
nitely renewable. Only some circumstance external to its structure can
interrupt the scene: the exhaustion of the two partners (that of only one
would not suffice), the arrival of a third party (in Werther it is Albert), or
else the sudden substitution of desire for aggression.
— Roland Barthes
A Lover’s Discourse 206

A
certain sense of mystery hangs around the final scene in J. M. Coetzee’s
Disgrace. Handing the dog he apparently comes to love over to Bev Shaw,
the veterinarian who euthanizes unwanted dogs, David Lurie relinquishes
to death both his love and his seeming ownership of the animal. Bev asks David,
“Are you giving him up?” “Yes,” says David, “I am giving him up” (220). David
Lurie, the disgraced college professor, a one-time expert in modern languages,
gives over to die perhaps the only creature ever to have treated him with true
affection. As David pulls the animal from its cage to be euthanized, “[t]he dog
wags its crippled rear, sniffs [David’s] face, licks his cheeks, his lips, [and] his
150 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 34, Number 3

ears” (220). The dog shows David genuine affection, unlike the cold affection
of the prostitute David frequents in Cape Town.1 Affection, indeed, unlike the
kind he sought from Melanie, the young college female David essentially rapes
only to lose his job.
Part of the mystery of this final scene (if indeed there is mystery at all) comes
from the realization that David’s act comes as an act of love, rather than as yet
another act of self-satisfaction. Throughout the novel David drowns in egotistic
self-satisfaction: he frequents a prostitute in Cape Town; he seduces a young stu-
dent to satisfy his sexual hunger; he tries to control the life of his adult daughter;
and he even satisfies his sexual urges with Bev Shaw, the woman with whom
he works and through whom he meets the dog he turns over to death. David’s
misogynistic tendencies are met by the affections of a dog, a dog for which David
“is sensible of a generous affection streaming out” (214). Coetzee describes David
as “adopted” by the dog, and he tells the readers that David knows “the dog would
die for him” (214). Despite his transgressions, David has come to be loved — not
by a woman but by a “young male [dog] with a withered left hindquarter which
it drags behind it” (214).
David’s decision to give the disabled but loving dog over to death may come
to a surprise to readers unfamiliar with Coetzee’s thematics, yet Coetzee scholars
might see this sacrifice as theoretically consistent with the writer’s œuvre. To
illustrate, in Coetzee’s first memoir, Boyhood, he tells of his mother’s desire to
get a dog for the family. “His mother decides that she wants a dog,” Coetzee
writes. He reveals that “they settle for a pup half Doberman, half something
else” (49–50). Naming the dog Cossack, Coetzee develops with the dog what
can be termed an intimate bond. The dog follows the author to school, and
“[i]n the end he has to drag him home by the collar” (50). This half Doberman,
however, is an undisciplined dog, and it commonly tramples gardens and makes
meals out of the neighbors’ chickens. Coetzee describes how one day Cossack
“eats the ground glass someone has put out for him” (50). By Coetzee’s account,
it is he as a child who races off to fetch medicine for the dog, only to return too
late. The dog having died, Coetzee describes how “[h]e helps to bury Cossack,
wrapped in a blanket, in the clay at the bottom of the garden” (50). Yet the words
that follow the burial are the most haunting. Coetzee writes, “He does not want
them to have another dog, not if this is how they must die” (50). Somehow, the
adult voice of Coetzee is joined with the voice of his boyhood, and in this unity
a reverence toward the suffering and ultimate death of the canine resonates. The
short anecdote from childhood — a common one, no doubt, about a first pet
and the death of that first pet — reveals Coetzee’s attentiveness to the delicate
ties that bind. These issues of delicacy are precisely what complicate moments
of love in Coetzee’s novels. Michael K’s love for his mother in Life & Times of
Michael K is complicated not only by physical immobility but also by political
immobility. Yet he returns her (more precisely her ashes) to her home, and what
he suffers to make this happen, from hiding from the authorities to imprison-
ment in a concentration camp, exemplifies not only the determined strength
Reading Coetzee in the Light of Barthes 151

of love, but also the more delicate personal side of love, the affectations that
love causes in the heart, the mind and the body. Thus, when Coetzee mentions
that he cannot witness another death like the death of Cossack, readers are
reminded of emotive forces behind affection and love. Such material is the stuff
of the “sympathetic imagination” Coetzee writes of in Elizabeth Costello and
Slow Man — the imagining of the suffering of the other and the consequential
affection that comes, in the instance of Boyhood, from imagining the suffering
of having eaten broken glass. 2
Furthermore, at the moment in Disgrace when David says, “I am giving him
up,” the reader is struck with the arrival of an outside party: Death. Death, one
might say, intervenes as another character in a scene during which the once-
esteemed college professor now assists in the killing of unwanted dogs. Death
meets David, and perhaps the only creature to show him any kind of uncondi-
tional affection — perhaps even unconditional love — he hands over to death,
giving up the fruits of affection and love altogether.
Others have read the novel’s ending in similar ways, focusing on issues
that arguably run alongside issues of love and even caring. Derek Attridge, for
instance, focusing on what he calls a “state of grace,” calls David’s final act of the
novel a “new mode of existence” (190). A state of grace, he says, “is not . . . the
opposite of disgrace” (178). 3 According to Attridge, the grace in the novel comes
in the form of “something given, not something earned” (180). Thus, David’s
giving of the dog “up to the waiting needle” acts to exhibit Lurie’s “new mode
of existence” (190). As Attridge describes it, “Coetzee offers no explanation of
Lurie’s loving dedication to surplus dogs, and certainly doesn’t proffer it as a
model for the New South Africa, or for any reader’s own conduct” (190). Instead,
he claims, the novel conveys grace not as a “lesson to be learned or a system to
be deployed” (190–91). What Attridge does is connect Lurie’s work on “killing
Sundays” to the concept of love, David’s “loving” work with the dogs on the days
when unwanted and disabled dogs are euthanized.
Tom Herron picks up where Attridge leaves off, arguing that it is in working
with the dogs that “the first flickerings of sympathy and of love seem to ignite
within [David]” (5). Herron rightly points out that “the notion of disgrace has
expanded to include all animals, nonhuman as well as human. All animals, alive
and dead” (6). In these lines, Herron reflects on the dignity of the Other, which
David so long ignored but now finds in the work he performs at the animal clinic.
His fondness, his love, for the animals, compels him to ease their suffering, per-
haps even to the point of leading the maimed and unwanted to execution — an
escape from the cruelty of undignified lives of handicap or dispossession. One
might add at this point Margot Norris’s claim that David Lurie “implies that
sexuality, passion, and love are charged with an animalistic undertow, as basis
or grounding in the human animal rather than in the cultural entity” (17). At
stake in the comments by Harris and Norris are the connectedness of love and
dogs, which Attridge explains as Lurie’s state of grace. But, this raises a question
regarding why one (especially a man like David Lurie, who seems to be “looking
152 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 34, Number 3

for love in all the wrong places,” to borrow a cliché) would hand over to death the
only thing, human or animal, that genuinely loves him.4
To phrase the question pointedly: Why would love compel one to euthanize
the beloved? This is perhaps the wrong question; or to use terms Coetzee might
use, it is the “right wrong question.”5 This final scene, however, can be read
quite illuminatingly alongside another text, Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse.
Indeed, David Lurie is a lover (a lover generally more inclined to eros than agape),
and this final scene is certainly a kind of lover’s discourse. This essay aims to
address how a paired reading of the final scene of Disgrace with A Lover’s Discourse
sheds light on David’s decision to hand his companion over to death and reveals
the more complicated notions of love Coetzee explores in the novel.
Turning to Barthes, a few key terms must be explored. The first, delicacy,
Barthes ties intimately with suffering. Barthes explores in his text the notion of
suffering oneself as the other suffers. He notes particularly the limits of compas-
sion (co-suffering). These limits, according to Barthes, are those instances during
which one, while sympathetic to the plight of the other, finds herself relieved
of the weight of that plight. “I am moved, anguished, for it is horrible to see
those one loves suffering,” writes Barthes, “but at the same time I remain dry,
watertight.” He goes on:
My identification is imperfect: I am a Mother (the other causes me concern), but an
insufficient mother; I bestir myself too much, in proportion to the profound reserve
in which, actually, I remain. For at the same time that I “sincerely” identify myself
with the other’s misery, what I read in this misery is that it occurs without me, and
that by being miserable by himself, the other abandons me: if he suffers without
my being the cause of his suffering, it is because I don’t count for him: his suffering
annuls me insofar as it constitutes him outside of myself. (57)

Barthes confronts the age-old problem of Being and the Other, and he reiterates
the understanding that compassion can only ever be incomplete in its efforts. One
cannot truly experience the pain of the Other, for the distance from the Other
is always an insurmountable divide. However, Barthes works his way through
this complex problem by making use of the distance between the Self and the
Other.6 For Barthes, the “detachment” one experiences from the Other might
be embraced:
since the other suffers without me, why suffer in his place? His misery bears him away
from me, I can only exhaust myself running after him, without ever hoping to be able
to catch up, to coincide with him. So let us become a little detached, let us undertake
the apprenticeship of a certain distance. Let the repressed word appear which ruses
to the lips of every subject, once he survives another’s death: Let us live! (58)

One could, then, simply remove oneself from the position of the suffering Other,
taking advantage of the distance between Self and Other in an effort to avoid the
Other’s agony. This too presents a problem. Complete detachment, the complete
Reading Coetzee in the Light of Barthes 153

reneging of compassion for the Other, certainly does not answer the call of love.
A lover of any kind cannot afford such detachment.
Barthes’s completion to the investigation of compassion approximates a Res-
toration notion of via media, a middle way to the absorption of oneself in the
Other’s suffering and the complete detachment from that suffering. He writes,
“I shall suffer with the other, but without pressure, without losing myself. Such
behavior, at once very affective and very controlled, very amorous and very civi-
lized, can be given a name: delicacy: in a sense it is the ‘healthy’ (artistic) form of
compassion” (58). To avoid turning to clinical psychology, it will suffice to say that
a measured relation to the suffering of the Other constitutes Barthes’s compassion.
One cannot run from the Other, especially a lover, when the Other is faced with
suffering. On the other hand, one cannot actually suffer the same pain. Delicacy
becomes necessary insofar as the individual must measure his distance and sympa-
thy. One must exercise the sympathetic imagination in an effort to understand the
suffering, but one must also remember the gap of “being-ness” that exists between
himself and Other. In much simpler terms, it is perhaps better practice to say “I
am sorry you feel terrible” than to say “I know exactly how you feel.”
The second of Barthes’s terms necessary for this reading of Disgrace is heart.
Of the heart, Barthes writes, “The heart is the organ of desire (the heart swells,
weakens, etc., like the sexual organs), as it is held enchanted, within the domain
of the Image-repertoire. What will the world, what will the other do with my
desire? That is the anxiety in which are gathered all the heart’s movements, all the
heart’s problems” (52). For Barthes, as for almost everyone, the heart is the seat of
sympathy, love and compassion. Yet, Barthes delineates the heart under different,
more metaphorical terms, as well. “The heart is what I imagine I give,” he writes:
Each time this gift is returned to me, then it is little enough to say, with Werther,
that the heart is what remains of me, once all the wit attributed to me and undesired
by me is taken away: the heart is what remains to me, and this heart that lies heavy
on my heart is heavy with the ebb which has filled it with itself (only the lover and
the child have a heavy heart). (53)

In this articulation, Barthes posits that the heart grows heavier as it is given away.
To give someone one’s heart, the individual in fact grows a heavier heart. That is,
the lover takes on the love of the heart of the Other, in addition to his own. The
heart grows heavy as it is given away, for it manifests not only love for the Other,
but also takes on concern for, desire for and love of the Other.
Also from Barthes, the term tenderness is advantageous for understanding
David Lurie’s final act in Disgrace. Tenderness, in fact, works as the key for both
Barthes’s text and Disgrace. Tenderness looks back upon the giving and gaining
of the heavy heart and the precious notion of delicacy Barthes outlines earlier
in his book. Tenderness comes from the gift of the heart, but it works by way of
delicacy. As Barthes describes:
154 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 34, Number 3

There is not only need for tenderness, there is also need to be tender for the other:
we shut ourselves up in a mutual kindness, we mother each other reciprocally; we
return to the root of all relations, where need and desire join. The tender gesture says:
ask me anything that can put your body to sleep, but also do not forget that I desire
you — a little, lightly, without trying to seize anything right away. (224)

It is necessary to read Barthes very carefully at this point, particularly his line “ask
me anything that can put your body to sleep, but also do not forget that I desire
you.” This line echoes across the final pages of Disgrace, as it is with tenderness
that David lets his dog go to die. Consider how carefully Coetzee words the acts
David will inevitably perform for his dog:
. . . he will have to bring him to Bev Shaw in her operating room (perhaps he will
carry him in his arms, perhaps he will do that for him) and caress him and brush
back the fur so that the needle can find the vein, and whisper to him and support him
in the moment when, bewilderingly, his legs buckle; and then, when the soul is out,
fold him up and pack him away in his bag, and the next day wheel the bag into the
flames and see that it is burnt, burnt up. He will do all that for him when his time
comes. It will be little enough, less than little: nothing. (219–20)

Coetzee is careful to include the phrase “for him” repeatedly in an effort to

show the tenderness David has for the dog he will help to exterminate. For him
David will caress. For him David will whisper. For him David will be the one
to dispose of the remains. These acts of tenderness, acts in which David very
literally puts a body to sleep without allowing that body to forget that he desires
it, stand in contrast to David’s earlier comprehensively narcissistic acts.7 In his
one-sided “romance” with Melanie, there are no acts of tenderness, only acts of
self-satisfaction. He is not willing to let the body of Melanie go. He only shows
a desire for the body that fulfills the needs of his libido. As “[h]e stretches out on
the bed beside her,” David thinks: “Every night she will be here; every night he can
slip into her bed like this, slip into her” (27). Melanie’s sexual appeal is of interest
to him, not her being. What appears to be tenderness with Melanie (conversations
about literary passions, the sharing of bottles of Meerlust, the seeming courtship
he engages in) are actually David’s atavistic desires for young, vibrant lovers whom
he can, without shame, mark as his sexual territory.8
Returning to the heart, Coetzee specifies the nature of David Lurie’s heart
as a damaged organ. “He has a sense that,” Coetzee writes, “a vital organ has been
bruised, abused — perhaps even his heart” (107). Elsewhere one reads that “only the
eroded shell of his heart remains” (156). Throughout Disgrace David’s heart repeat-
edly suffers from setbacks, but these setbacks are consequences of his own disgrace-
ful shamelessness. Misplaced overtures to Soraya and Melanie, indiscrete control
over Lucy and her relationship with Petras and his flop as both an academic (he
loses his job due to the affair with Melanie) and a father fail, at nearly every point,
to deter David from his pointedly masculine and rather rugged stoicism. When
Lucy, for example, discusses her reason for caring for dogs, David’s response is cold:
Reading Coetzee in the Light of Barthes 155

“Lucy, my dearest, don’t be cross. Yes, I agree, this is the only life there is. As for
animals, by all means let us be kind to them. But let us not lose perspective. We are
of a different order of creation from the animals. Not higher, necessarily, just differ-
ent. So if we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we
feel guilty or fear retribution.” (74)

The former professor delivers a lecture to his daughter, and Coetzee refers to this
speech as a “homily.” This homily is colored with interesting terms: “perspec-
tive,” “different” and “simple generosity.” His perspective is certainly different.
He admits his guilt to the faculty committee reviewing the case of his affair with
Melanie, but he simultaneously refuses to admit wrongdoing. His exchange with
Dr. Swarts is tense. David asks the committee what they want from him to make
the matter dissolve, to which Swarts replies, “An admission that you were wrong.”
David toys with the committee, and an exchange follows:
“I have admitted that. Freely. I am guilty of the charges brought against me.”
“Don’t play games with us, David. There is a difference between you pleading
guilty to a charge and admitting you were wrong, and you know that.”
“And that will satisfy you: an admission I was wrong?”
“No,” says Farodia Rassool. “That would be back to front. First Professor Lurie
must make his statement. Then we can decide whether to accept it in mitigation. We
don’t negotiate first on what should be in his statement. The statement should come
from him, in his own words. Then we can see if it comes from his heart.” (54)

The conflict, of course, is that David Lurie refuses to admit that the formal, docu-
mented or ritualized admission of guilt constitutes an admission that comes from
the heart. David, in fact, thinks practically in stringent legal terms, accepting guilt
for the “legislated” charges against him, but failing to connect the policies of the
institution with policies of personal ethics. While David may be responsible for
harms to Melanie (resultant in her leaving university or suffering public shame),
he admits only to transgressions against school policy.
Issues of public and private space abound in David’s conflict with the faculty
committee, yet in one vein the issues center on issues of heart. The committee
wishes to hear David’s complete confession in an effort to determine whether or
not it comes from the heart. David, on the other hand, considers the committee’s
need for a confession “from the heart” to be political, not personal, and with-
holds access, so to speak, to the feelings of his heart. Thus, when Barthes writes
of Werther’s complaints of Prince von X, “You wait for me where I do not want
to go: you love me where I do not exist” and “the world and I are not interested
in the same thing; and to my misfortune, this divided thing is myself ” (52), one
cannot help but see shadows of David Lurie. To David’s mind, the committee
requires a confession of the mind; that is, a legal and logical confession that may
preserve his job, if not his dignity as well. Yet, David is more interested in his
heart. For David, the issue of the heart is repentance, and he is not willing to
repent. “Manas,” he says:
156 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 34, Number 3

“[W]e went through this repentance business yesterday. I told you what I thought.
I won’t do it. I appeared before an officially constituted tribunal, before a branch of
the law. Before that secular tribunal I pleaded guilty, a secular plea. That plea should
suffice. Repentance is neither here nor there. Repentance belongs to another world,
to another universe of discourse.” (58)

This other universe of discourse rests in the heart, particularly the heart that
Barthes writes of. Such a heart rejects the logical ordered world of institutional
politics and favors instead the intimacy of sharing a burden, of growing heavy.
For David, repentance, if any is due, is due to Melanie and her family, and he
ultimately repents by visiting Melanie’s home and offering an apology to Melanie
and her family: “Normally I would say,” he says, “that after a certain age one is too
old to learn lessons. One can only be punished and punished” (172). While Mr.
Isaacs, Melanie’s father, remains hostile to David until the end, David continues
with what he sees as his atonement for his affair with Melanie. When Mr. Isaacs
telephones David in the evening after their uncomfortable exchange, David
expresses, perhaps for the first time, a kind of selflessness. Mr. Isaacs asserts, “You
are not hoping for us to intervene on your behalf, are you, with the university?”
Isaacs refuses to help David regain his position at the college. David, now perhaps
repentant, assures Isaacs that his intent was not a political one: “The thought never
crossed my mind. I have finished with the university” (173–74).
The instances of David’s confrontation with the university committee and
his cold interaction with Mr. Isaacs, along with Barthes’s notion of the heart,
offer help for understanding David’s desire to give up his maimed canine com-
panion. Having suffering indignity before a counsel of peers, having humiliated
himself before the father of the young woman he raped, David recognizes the
consequences of his actions and notices the resulting suffering his indignity has
brought him. He is maimed, with only the eroded shell of a heart, with scars and
trauma from a criminal attack and with broken relationships with his friends and
his daughter. His operatic dreams on hold, his career over, David is in a similar
broken condition as his dog. The dog is crippled, its left hind leg useless; it is not
wanted by anyone, left unadopted and only days from the needle. David takes to
the animal, finding joy in the dog’s liking of banjo music and letting the dog out
of its cage to wander “in its grotesque way around the yard” (215).
Having suffered his own indignity, David cannot help but alleviate the
indignity of the unwanted dogs as they are euthanized. “He has learned by now,”
Coetzee writes, “to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing,
giving it what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name: love”
(219). The caresses, the touch and compassion David shows the animals as they
fall quietly to death are the outward manifestations of a heart grown heavy with
love of and for the other. David knows the pain of indignity and maiming. He,
by his own fault, has caused his downfall, and now in the winter of his life must
endure these humiliations. The dog, on the other hand, did not earn its indignity.
It did nothing to be maimed (as far as David knows), and it made no choices to
Reading Coetzee in the Light of Barthes 157

reduce itself to the population of unwanted hounds. David, feeling the weight of
his own heart in the wake of suffering, and via compassion feeling the weight of
the heart of the dog that has taken to him so brilliantly, desires to end the pain of
being for the creature. The animal, even in the joy of companionship with David,
suffers. David personifies the handicapped and unadopted dog’s suffering as the
same indignity he (David) suffers. Giving the dog up to death, David thinks, will
release the animal from these pains. “He can save the young dog, if he wishes,”
writes Coetzee, “for another week. But a time must come, it cannot be evaded”
(219). Letting the dog go while he holds the weight of its heart, while he can be
present to comfort the creature, and letting it go without suffering even more from
its disability and unwantedness, David can both express his love in physical terms
(his work comforting the animal as it is euthanized) as well as in transcendent
terms (his work alleviating suffering by way of needle). In very physical terms
“the heart is what remains to [David], and this heart that lies heavy on [his] heart
is heavy with the ebb which has filled it with itself ” (Barthes, Lovers 53). David
at once keeps his heart, but it remains knowing that it has lost something it has
loved, that it has comforted another being at the end of life, that it endures now
the weighty consolation of knowing it has eased another’s suffering. These weights
make David’s words, “Yes, I am giving him up,” weighty enough to conclude
Disgrace (220).
This final moment in Disgrace returns this article to Barthes’s notion of deli-
cacy. One must balance, according to Barthes, the amount of compassion for to
the amount of identification with the Other in an effort to achieve the most deli-
cate form of compassion. This he calls a “ ‘healthy’ (artistic) form of compassion”
(58). Additionally, Barthes indicates qualities of this delicacy: “very affective and
very controlled” and “very amorous and very civilized” (58). Thus, in the balance,
one must achieve a moment of aesthetic success, for it is in the moment that one
has given enough of himself, but only just enough that he does not lose himself in
the Other. Barthes illustrates this notion of “only just enough” by invoking Plato’s
speaking “of Ate’s delicacy: her foot is winged, it touches lightly” (58).
Understanding precisely what Barthes means by delicacy can be a bit tricky.
In Roland Barthes he contrasts delicacy with fingering at a piano. Piano finger-
ing, according to Barthes, is not an act of delicacy, an act of touch, but rather a
mechanical act:
At the piano, “fingering” has nothing to do with an assigned value of elegance and
delicacy (which we refer to as “touch”) but merely designates as way of numbering the
fingers which must play this or that note; fingering establishes in a deliberate manner
what will become an automatism: in short, it is the programming of a machine, an
animal inscription. (79)

Furthermore, one can deduce Barthes’s notion of delicacy by reading his

reflections on French wine drinking:
158 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 34, Number 3

what is characteristic of France is that the converting power of wine is never openly
presented as an end. Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by
everyone; in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is
felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which
is sought. . . . (Mythologies 59)

Thus, the Barthesian notion of delicacy resides simultaneously in human

touch and in practical limits. Touch itself is a delicate act, manipulating an object
or even another body with movement of the fingertips. Likewise, as seen by his
comments on French wine drinking, delicacy is a limit. Were one to drink wine
in a Barthesian sense, one would drink it delicately, that is, to the limit preceding
drunkenness, to the point where the intoxicating effects of wine are enjoyed but
not indulged.
Furthermore, in The Pleasure of the Text, there is also an approach to delicacy
by way of the term edge. Barthes writes, speaking of modern works:
their value would proceed from their duplicity. By which it must be understood that
they always have two edges. The subversive edge may seem privileged because it is
the edge of violence; but it is not violence which affects pleasure, nor is it destruc-
tion which interests it; what pleasure wants is the site of a loss, the seam, the cut,
the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss. Culture thus
recurs as an edge: in no matter what form. (7)

This notion of edge runs analogous in some ways to the notion of limit Barthes
delineates when speaking of drunkenness and wine. The edge, the delicate delin-
eation between one extreme and the other, is the point of interest, the point of
seduction. The edge must be a spot of delicacy, such as the laced edge of a cuff on
fine Regency gown. The delicate, laced cuff at once ornaments the dress and the
wearer, but it also excites the senses, being the point where clothing meets the
flesh, exposing to the imagination the skin beneath the gown, the sexual being
beneath the garment.9
Indeed, Coetzee’s Disgrace ends in a moment of loss, but it also is a point of
delicacy. While it is perfectly possible (and even quite likely) to read this final
scene as a heavy scene, there is also a sense that the final line, “Yes, I am giving
him up,” also “touches lightly,” like the foot of Ate. Coetzee’s aesthetic gesture,
ending the novel with a death, the death of perhaps the only being that showed
true affection for David, coincides with David’s own aesthetic gesture of deli-
cacy — of compassion. One might read David’s concentration on the procedure
in Bev Shaw’s clinic as the work of an intercessor, enduring the anxiety of his
dog so that his dog suffers none when the time comes. The scene in the room is
one of fear and despair: “Something happens in this room, something unmen-
tionable: here the soul is yanked out of the body; briefly it hangs about in the air,
twisting and contorting; then it is sucked away and is gone. It will be beyond
him, this room that is not a room but a hole where one leaks out of existence”
(219). However, David knows the dogs will not know where they are heading,
Reading Coetzee in the Light of Barthes 159

that they “will not be able to work [it] out” (219). In a sense, David achieves a
kind of delicate compassion. By experiencing himself the fear, the troubling job
of watching innocent dogs and cats euthanized one after another, he learns what
his dog cannot know about its own fate. David then suffers these fears, and by
suffering those fears, knows how to calm his dog at the end: he knows just how
to stroke its fur and what to whisper in its ear. Resorting also to the delicacy of
touch, David calms the animal on its deathbed. Furthermore, David does not lose
himself in the Other, as Barthes warns. David does not die. He lives on, carrying
forever in his heart the sense of his disgrace. However, he hands over to death, to
a kind of “un-suffering,” the dog for which he feels affection, a dog that he loses
to alleviate the dog’s suffering of disability and neglect. Earlier in the novel David
tells Lucy, “We are of a different order of creation from the animals” (74). In a
way, David proves his point by letting his dog go. He has the ability to negotiate
the delicacies of compassion, of sympathy and of suffering. He asserts this ability
over the dog, lovingly staying with it to the very end, calming the canine until its
final breath. He also stands at the precipice between life and death with the dog,
ensuring the comfort of passing that threshold.
This argument by no means asserts that Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse is the
magic key to understanding David Lurie’s final act in Disgrace. However, what one
learns by examining some of the key shared topics in both works — particularly,
delicacy, heart and tenderness — is that there exists for David Lurie a kind of lov-
ing redemption in the final pages of the book. While South African politics color
the text, invariably complicating any reading, a Barthesian reading, focusing on
the immediate events that appear to reshape David Lurie in the end, brings into
focus a more redeeming view of David, the disgraced college professor, who up
until the final lines of Disgrace appears to lack social grace at all. Thus, Attridge
remains correct about the “state of grace” at the end of the novel, the “new mode
of existence” for David Lurie. This new mode of existence is one of a lover, a
Barthesian lover, who has perhaps refilled the empty shell of a heart he once had
and learns the grace of tenderness and delicacy.

Notes
1. After seeing Soraya, the prostitute, with two boys (presumably her sons) on St. George’s Street,
David “feels a growing coolness as she transforms herself into just another woman and him into
just another client” (7).
2. Attridge’s chapter on Boyhood and Youth in J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading helps to illustrate
the effect of Coetzee’s memoir. Attridge notes Coetzee’s careful employment of the third person as
a means to “short-circuit” the “interminable spiraling of confession” (143). He calls Boyhood a testi-
mony, “a vivid account of what it was like to grow up as a white male in the 1950s in South Africa
. . .” (155). Such vividness is meant to invoke a sense of “sympathetic imagination” with Coetzee, to
bring the reader to the threshold of the writer himself.
3. In Doubling the Point, Coetzee defines grace as “a condition in which the truth can be told clearly,
without blindness” (392). One might argue that David Lurie’s final act in Disgrace is the least blind
160 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 34, Number 3

of all of his acts. He knows the dog will die and be irrevocably lost, yet this truth he shares with
himself clearly, without blindness.
4. There are of course political reverberations in this act as well. One must certainly see South
African politics, particularly issues such as truth and reconciliation, as part of the formula of the
novel. However, the aesthetic choices Coetzee makes with the novel speak much more broadly. As
the Nobel Committee press release announcing his 2003 award reads, “It is in exploring weakness
and defeat that Coetzee captures the divine spark in man.” Thus, Coetzee writes not only for South
Africa and its particular political and social conditions, but also for the rest of mankind and its
multiple troubling conditions.
5. This is, of course, a phrase borrowed from Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. Elizabeth says that Sultan
the ape’s thoughts regarding using crates to get bananas are a part of Woflgang Kholer’s experiments.
Sultan is required to use crates or sticks to secure bananas kept just out of his reach. The “right wrong
thought” of Sultan is to try to use crates to reach bananas (73). However, in this particular instance
the bananas can be reached only with a stick, not with crates. In this same way, the question posed
here is the right question, but at the wrong time. Before one can decide whether or not a state of love is
present or absent in David’s act, one must ask the question, “What kind of love would such a love be?”
6. This suggests a contradiction to the uncertainty of Self and Other proposed by Hegel: “Each is
indeed certain of its own self, but not of the other, and therefore its own self-certainty still has no
truth” (113). Barthes appears to dismiss this uncertainty in favor of an assured sense of Self and the
suffering of the Other.
7. Reverberating throughout this comment are Derrida’s comments on narcissism: “There is not
narcissism and non-narcissism; there are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous,
open, extended. What is called non-narcissism is in general but the economy of a much more wel-
coming, hospitable narcissism, one that is much more open to the experience of the other as other.
. . . Love is narcissistic. Beyond that, there are little narcissisms, there are big narcissisms, and there
is death in the end, which is the limit.”
8. Derek Attridge deals elegantly with representations of shame in Coetzee in J. M. Coetzee and the
Ethics of Reading, particularly in the chapter “Confessing in the Third Person.”
9. This idea of seduction is best read alongside Barthes’s “Striptease” from Mythologies. The
G-String, as Barthes describes it, is a point of seduction (and perhaps delicacy) because of its use as
an edge of sorts. He writes, “[t]his ultimate triangle, by its pure and geometrical shape, by its hard
and shiny material, bars the way to the sexual parts like a sword [or edge] of purity, and definitively
drives the woman back into the mineral world, the (precious) stone being here the irrefutable symbol
of the absolute object, that which serves no purpose” (85). I am indebted to Brian Macaskill for this
illustration of delicacy.

Works Cited
Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Print.
Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang,
1978. Print.
———. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. 1972. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998. Print.
———. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Print.
———. Roland Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard. 1977. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Print.
Coetzee, J. M. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. New York: Viking, 1997. Print.
———. Disgrace. 1999. New York: Penguin, 2000. Print.
Reading Coetzee in the Light of Barthes 161

———. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
1992. Print.
———. Elizabeth Costello. New York: Viking, 2003. Print.
———. Life & Times of Michael K. 1983. New York: Penguin, 1985. Print.
———. Slow Man. New York: Viking, 2005. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. “There is No ‘One’ Narcissism.” Derrida: Online. University of Minnesota. 2006. Web.
9 Jan. 2009.
Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. New York: Oxford UP, 1977. Print.
Herron, Tom. “The Dog Man: Becoming Animal in Coetzee’s Disgrace.” Twentieth-Century Literature
51.4 (2005): 467–90. Print.
“The Nobel Prize in Literature 2003.” Press Release. Nobelprize.org. Nobel Foundation. 2003. Web.
10 Jan. 2009.
Norris, Margot. “The Human Animal in Fiction.” Parallax 21.1 (2006): 4–20. Print.
Copyright of Journal of Modern Literature is the property of Indiana University Press and its content may not be
copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.