Very morbid phenomena: “Liberal Funk”, the “Lucy-syndrome” and JM Coetzee's Disgrace (original) (raw)

Scrutiny2, 2001

Abstract

I n JM Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), the character Lucy Lurie is raped by three black men on her smallholding outside Salem in the Eastern Province. For reasons that are never directly articulated in the novel, Lucy responds to her ordeal rather enigmatically: she does not report the rape to the police and she continues to live on the smallholding without attempting to secure the premises. Critics in South Africa have responded to Coetzee's depiction of the rape and ensuing events in terms that are predictable in a literary establishment which seems, as a matter of course, to reduce heterogeneous political, social and literary positions to the simplistic oppositions of race politics. On the one hand, Coetzee has been criticized for the supposed conservatism or racism implicit in his portrayal of the rape of a white woman by black men. Although this criticism is most evident in the African National Congress's submission to the Human Rights Commission's inquiry into racism in the media, it can also be seen in Michiel Heyns's dismissive reference to Disgrace as a "Liberal Funk" novel (2000), that is, as representative of a sub-genre of the South African novel that records liberal fear at the marginalization of whites in the post-apartheid period. On the other hand, Coetzee's portrayal of Lucy Lurie's passivity following her rape has been read as exemplifying whites' acceptance of their peripherality in the "new" South Africa. This interpretation was first offered by Athol Fugard and has since become something of an orthodox response to the novel, which is somewhat ironic, given that Fugard, by his own admission at the time of his comments, had not yet read the novel:

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