J. M. Coetzee
Disgrace
Penguin
First Published: 1999
220 pages
Not everyone who received a Noble Prize for Literature deserved it; many former winners are deservedly forgotten. Others--Philip Roth comes to mind--deserve what they'll (probably) never receive. J.M. Coetzee, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, did indeed deserve what he received; his novel, Disgrace, makes this abundantly clear.
His polished, masterful prose tells the story of the disgrace of a compromised man who refuses to compromise. Is it the portrait of Flannery-O'Connor-like redemption? Yes, but not quite. The fall of a man with a tragic flaw? Yes, but not quite. Is it the story of a man who is out-of-joint with an out-of-joint world? Perhaps. Is it a tale of a professor who deeply cares about literature in a world in which nobody cares what he has to say? Perhaps. This short novel is actually all these things--and much more. It is clear; it is ambiguous--It is a masterpiece.
l.
The professor protagonist is named David Lurie, twice divorced and fifty-two years old. He has withdrawn into an inner world of aestheticism; no one is aware of his inner depths, and, if they were, they would likely be indifferent. . The university at which he has taught for many years has been transformed by "the great rationalization." The institution that employs him, formerly called Cape Town University College is now called Cape Technological University. Formerly a professor of modern languages, Lurie was demoted to an adjunct professorship of communications, after the literature department had been decimated. He is allowed to teach one literature course, called "a special-field course" once a year. Mostly he must teach communication skills--He hates this so much that he makes little impression on the students; they have difficulty recalling his name. Not that anyone in his yearly literature course admires him either; the only reflection the students seem to be passionate about is their own in the mirror. He is like an aesthetic Saint Francis talking about the love of words and thought to a flock of birds, some of them quite good-looking birds, yet bird-brained nevertheless. Even worse, he has no friends, merely acquaintances.
As if this tremendous isolation were not bad enough, there are several other bads that accompany it. He has been at times a womanizer in his life; now at 52, he has to work harder at attracting women. He is thus terrified about growing old. This is what he has to say about aging:
Yet the old men whose company he seems to be on the point of joining, the tramps and drifters with their stained raincoats and cracked false teeth and hairy earholes--all of them were once upon a time children of God, with straight limbs and clear eyes, Can they be blamed for clinging to the last to their place at the sweet banquet of the senses?
(p. 24)
Aging gracefully this is not. Lurie has never taken the effort to maintain a relationship with someone his age, during which the pains of growing old are compensated to a considerable degree by the joys of a long-lasting love. Notice that in the above-quoted passage that Lurie is frightened of losing even more respect in old age; the lack of regard he now receives from others will only get worse. He will not become a respected patriarch; he believes, with some justification, that he one day will be a friendless, pitiful tramp.
The only somewhat satisfying connection he has with anyone is through sex. This eventually makes matters worse. The novel begins with him in the arms of a call girl whom he visits once a week. He begins to fall for her. When she unexpectedly leaves, he has a detective trace her whereabouts. She is furious when he calls; even she, apparently, has a happy family and forbids him to call her again. She had absolutely no emotional involvement with him. After this, he has an affair with one of his students, the highly attractive but very bland Melanie Isaacs. Coetzee is very careful to assure the reader that this is not an exploitative situation. Melanie has a very casual attitude toward sex; she gives in to him in much the same way that one would imagine someone giving in to a persistent friend who asks her to watch a movie she's not particularly interested in. They have sex a few times. One night she arrives distraught at his flat and asks if she could stay for a while. She apparently has had a fight with her boyfriend. Now Melanie has a need; she wants him to be a father figure and provide solace. The narcissistic Lurie misses this cue completely and has sex with her again. This time she feels used and humiliated. She withdraws from school. Her tough boyfriend confronts Lurie; Melanie's parents arrive. The walls of the little corner he lives in fall, revealing an abyss.
He is accused of sexual harassment and is brought before the college board that handles such things. Some are sympathetic; they advise him that he will probably be able to keep his job if he humbly apologizes, accepts some sort of punishment, and agrees to receive counseling. Even the feminist member of the board, who is after his blood, gives an indication that she might show some clemency--if he is sufficiently humiliated. Lurie has had enough; he refuses to cooperate, he the apolitical individualist refuses to submit and defend his own interests. He would rather give up his sole source of income, rather than surrender his integrity. He is dismissed from the college in disgrace.
2. The rest of the book is about how Lurie comes to accept his disgrace and transcend it. Having no place to go, he moves in with his daughter, Lucy, who has a "smallholding," a little farm on the East Cape. She runs a kennel and grows flowers and vegetables which she sells at the local market. She calls Lurie by his first name--there isn't much of a father/daughter relationship left. She has heard of "David's" troubles. In a remarkable passage, he explains to her why he gave everything up rather than accept the censure of the college morality board. He asks Lucy whether she recalls a dog that belonged to a neighbor when Lucy was a small child:
'It was a male. Whenever there was a bitch in the vicinity it would get excited and unmanageable, and with Pavlovian regularity the owners would beat it. This went on until the poor dog didn't know what to do. At the smell of a bitch it would chase around the garden with its ears flat and its tail between its legs, whining, trying to hide.'
He pauses. "I don't see the point," says Lucy. And indeed what is the point?
"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 instinct unchecked. Is that the moral?'
"No, this 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.
'Or to have it fixed.'
'Perhaps. But at the deepest level I think it might have preferred being shot. It might have preferred that to the options it was offered: on the one hand, to deny its nature, on the other, to spend the rest of its days padding about the living-room, sighing and sniffing the cat and getting portly.'
"Have you always felt that way, David?
'No, not always. Sometimes I have felt just the opposite. That desire is a burden we could well do without.'
'I must say," says Lucy, "That is a view I incline toward myself.'
page 90
Lucy has obviously inherited her father's intelligence; she's even more of an enigma. The child, to paraphrase Wordsworth, becomes the mother of the man--by the end of the book, Lurie accepts his daughter's view that "desire is a burden we could well do without." What compensates for the loss of this (glorious?) burden is that Lurie begins to care for others. The learning of empathy is perhaps the most difficult task for a narcissist; Lurie, under duress, does indeed make spiritual progress. He has given up any desire to mold Lucy according to his wishes. He accepts her. It is not easy; Lucy has grown portly, a trait her father detests. She had been living as a couple with a woman who has left, apparently never to return. This, if one reads between the lines, has traumatized her. Lucy is also broken like her father; she has given up on any desire for happiness in the conventional sense. All she wants is to be left alone in the country with her dogs, of which she is very fond. (An essay could be written about the canine symbolism in this book. Are they the objects of compassion--even love--on the part of those who have been reduced by society to being dogs themselves? Are they emblems of good beings ignored and abused by corrupt ones? What else?)
Poor Lurie has little to do with his time; he decides to work at a local ramshackle veterinary clinic where he is the assistant to a woman named Bev Shaw. He finds her at first physically repulsive--a dumpy, poorly dressed woman with "no neck"--the very opposite of Melanie Isaacs. He soon learns that she, unlike Melanie, is not bland on the inside; we learn by the way she treats animals that she is quite compassionate. She is also sex-starved and lonely. He eventually has sex with her too, but with a major difference: for perhaps the first time he has sex with a woman not to please himself, but to please her. Things are changing.
It is now Lucy's turn to be disgraced. She is brutally raped by three men, who had locked up Lurie in the bathroom before attacking his daughter. After they're done, they return to Lurie to get the keys to the car so they can steal it. After this, they set him on fire. He escapes with minor injuries, but his hair is gone--the ironic reference to Samson is obvious. This is the low point of his daughter's--and also of her now loving father's--lives. On this tragedy he poignantly reflects that he can speak French and Italian, but had not been able to protect what is most important to him, the welfare of his daughter.
Lucy has decided to stay on the farm, no matter what--she apparently has given everything else up and has no other hopes for the future than to be left alone with her dogs. Since the end of apartheid, however, it has become much more dangerous to live on an isolated farm--especially for whites, not to mention for a single white woman. She needs protection. She has hired someone, a black man named Petrus, whose ambition it is to take over everything. She knows this, and assents to it, provided that she be allowed to live in her house and maintain the kennels. Petrus, almost always on the farm, has mysteriously disappeared during the
rape. The implication is that Petrus was behind the attack; he wanted to humiliate her and make her realize that she cannot survive without his protection. She is shocked by the hate of her assailants. (The long era of apartheid was not particularly good for race relations!) Petrus's involvement is made more likely by the fact that one of the men turns out to be a relative and begins to live on the property. Lurie is furious and wants to call the police. She forbids this; she knows that she would not be able to stay on the farm if Petrus's relative is charged with rape. Even worse: she soon finds out she has been impregnated by one of the three men, which one she doesn't know. The deal she eventually works out is this: she will marry Petrus, provided that he allows her to live in the house alone and continue the services she supplies for the dogs. He will own the entire property. The farm has become her only refuge; she will do almost anything--except becoming Petrus's mistress--to remain there. Most people would view her as being at least as stubborn as her father, equally unable to look out for her own interests.
Lurie is determined to take his daughter out of danger; he moves back to his flat in the city in the hope that he and his daughter will live there as they did when she was a child. Neighbors shun him. The university has replaced him and forgotten about him. It's not going to work. He decides to move back and rent a flat near his daughter.
On the way back he stops at the house of Melanie's parents. He abjectly apologizes--he gets down on this hands and knees and bows down. Yes, a rather extreme way to say you're sorry, but Lurie, as is his daughter, is given to extremes and has probably never really apologized before. A comical element is that Melanie's father is convinced that he's doing this to obtain their help to get him reinstated at the college. He can't imagine that Lurie is just apologizing and has no ulterior motives.
The ending of the novel is particularly beautiful. He is back volunteering at the animal clinic, helping Bev euthanize unwanted animals. This is hard on her; she loves animals. She reasons that if they must die, they should at least die at the hands of someone who treats them with compassion. Lurie, who has learned this compassion through her, has befriended a crippled dog, one who must drag his hindquarters behind him as he walks. They develop an inordinate affection for each other. One day, the dogs that were to be euthanized that day are all already dead. Lurie's dog is the only one left. This is how the novel ends:
He crosses the surgery. "Was that the last?" asks Bev Shao.
"One more."
He opens the cage door. 'Come,' he says, bends, opens his arms. The dog wags its crippled rear, sniffs his face, licks his cheeks, his lips, his ears. He does nothing to stop it. 'Come.'
Bearing him in his arms like a lamb, he re-enters the surgery. "I thought you would save him for another week,' says Bev Shaw. 'Are you giving him up?'
"Yes, I am giving him up.'
4.
This great novel is a story of redemption after all, but not of a Christian sort--Lurie is a lapsed Christian. He is a Buddhist even if he is unaware of it. He obtains something very similar if not identical to Nirvana at the end, the peace that comes with the extinction of desire. He doesn't even have the desire to spare the dog he loves for a week; the dog is doomed and he will not prolong its misery just because he is fond of it. His needs are no longer paramount.I don't think he will now become anything like the drifter in the first quote or like the miserable dog in the second. I think he will go on to be a good grandfather--certainly better than he has been as a father!
Lurie is now a master of the four cardinal virtues of Buddhism called the Brahma Vihara:
1. Karuna--compassion--something new for him. He has completely triumphed over his narcissism. A touching example of his compassion and new humility is that he now takes the dead dogs in bags to the incinerator. He is there to assure that workers don't strike the bags with shovels--the dogs are in a state of rigor mortis and would fit in the incinerator better if the contents of the bags were beaten into a smaller size--like garbage. He is there to assure a modicum of dignity. No one will notice. . Yes, he has learned karuna well..
2. Metta-love. Love has replaced lust and self-absorption in his life. His love for his daughter, the animals and others--including his unborn grandson-- is obvious by the end of the book.
3. Muditha--sympathetic joy, the joy in other people's success, Mitfreude, the opposite of Schadenfreude, Buddhism, as far as I know, is the only system that emphasizes this virtue--or even has a name for it. The Buddhists thought that compassion was to be given freely to those less fortunate--it is not enough. The ego must be humbled further by love of those more fortunate--resulting in the destruction of envy and jealousy. Actually, Lurie has not been a jealous person--he had been too self-absorbed for that. He now has opportunities, however, for a more active role of muditha.
4. Uphekkha--Serenity. He no longer bears the burden of untoward desire. He has gained inner serenity which cannot help but make the world--even his much reduced world--a better place. He has lost almost everything, but what remains will be enough. He no longer has to chase rainbows; he is now at home on the earth and accepts his place.
A happy ending--of sorts. (Buddhists are allowed to have friends!)
This might not be the only possible interpretation of the novel, but is indeed a valid one.. Coetzee is a subtle author, and, just like life, indicates what is important without providing a manual.
I have been deeply affected by this extraordinary novel. Uncompromising devotion to a speck of inner integrity, pressed by experience into a diamond, can indeed reflect the light of the sun, the light of the entire world.
.
Thomas Dorsett
You are welcome to read book review of the Baltimore Online Bookclub by googling the title of the novel along with my full name.
1. The New Life by Orhan Pamuk
2..Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
Our next meeting will take place on April 3, 2014. The six member of our group will discuss the novel, A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter, on that date; I will post my review shorty after we meet, You are invited to read the book, followed by the review, and, if you wish, post your comments onto the blog. I wish you pleasurable reading!
Disgrace
Penguin
First Published: 1999
220 pages
Not everyone who received a Noble Prize for Literature deserved it; many former winners are deservedly forgotten. Others--Philip Roth comes to mind--deserve what they'll (probably) never receive. J.M. Coetzee, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, did indeed deserve what he received; his novel, Disgrace, makes this abundantly clear.
His polished, masterful prose tells the story of the disgrace of a compromised man who refuses to compromise. Is it the portrait of Flannery-O'Connor-like redemption? Yes, but not quite. The fall of a man with a tragic flaw? Yes, but not quite. Is it the story of a man who is out-of-joint with an out-of-joint world? Perhaps. Is it a tale of a professor who deeply cares about literature in a world in which nobody cares what he has to say? Perhaps. This short novel is actually all these things--and much more. It is clear; it is ambiguous--It is a masterpiece.
l.
The professor protagonist is named David Lurie, twice divorced and fifty-two years old. He has withdrawn into an inner world of aestheticism; no one is aware of his inner depths, and, if they were, they would likely be indifferent. . The university at which he has taught for many years has been transformed by "the great rationalization." The institution that employs him, formerly called Cape Town University College is now called Cape Technological University. Formerly a professor of modern languages, Lurie was demoted to an adjunct professorship of communications, after the literature department had been decimated. He is allowed to teach one literature course, called "a special-field course" once a year. Mostly he must teach communication skills--He hates this so much that he makes little impression on the students; they have difficulty recalling his name. Not that anyone in his yearly literature course admires him either; the only reflection the students seem to be passionate about is their own in the mirror. He is like an aesthetic Saint Francis talking about the love of words and thought to a flock of birds, some of them quite good-looking birds, yet bird-brained nevertheless. Even worse, he has no friends, merely acquaintances.
As if this tremendous isolation were not bad enough, there are several other bads that accompany it. He has been at times a womanizer in his life; now at 52, he has to work harder at attracting women. He is thus terrified about growing old. This is what he has to say about aging:
Yet the old men whose company he seems to be on the point of joining, the tramps and drifters with their stained raincoats and cracked false teeth and hairy earholes--all of them were once upon a time children of God, with straight limbs and clear eyes, Can they be blamed for clinging to the last to their place at the sweet banquet of the senses?
(p. 24)
Aging gracefully this is not. Lurie has never taken the effort to maintain a relationship with someone his age, during which the pains of growing old are compensated to a considerable degree by the joys of a long-lasting love. Notice that in the above-quoted passage that Lurie is frightened of losing even more respect in old age; the lack of regard he now receives from others will only get worse. He will not become a respected patriarch; he believes, with some justification, that he one day will be a friendless, pitiful tramp.
The only somewhat satisfying connection he has with anyone is through sex. This eventually makes matters worse. The novel begins with him in the arms of a call girl whom he visits once a week. He begins to fall for her. When she unexpectedly leaves, he has a detective trace her whereabouts. She is furious when he calls; even she, apparently, has a happy family and forbids him to call her again. She had absolutely no emotional involvement with him. After this, he has an affair with one of his students, the highly attractive but very bland Melanie Isaacs. Coetzee is very careful to assure the reader that this is not an exploitative situation. Melanie has a very casual attitude toward sex; she gives in to him in much the same way that one would imagine someone giving in to a persistent friend who asks her to watch a movie she's not particularly interested in. They have sex a few times. One night she arrives distraught at his flat and asks if she could stay for a while. She apparently has had a fight with her boyfriend. Now Melanie has a need; she wants him to be a father figure and provide solace. The narcissistic Lurie misses this cue completely and has sex with her again. This time she feels used and humiliated. She withdraws from school. Her tough boyfriend confronts Lurie; Melanie's parents arrive. The walls of the little corner he lives in fall, revealing an abyss.
He is accused of sexual harassment and is brought before the college board that handles such things. Some are sympathetic; they advise him that he will probably be able to keep his job if he humbly apologizes, accepts some sort of punishment, and agrees to receive counseling. Even the feminist member of the board, who is after his blood, gives an indication that she might show some clemency--if he is sufficiently humiliated. Lurie has had enough; he refuses to cooperate, he the apolitical individualist refuses to submit and defend his own interests. He would rather give up his sole source of income, rather than surrender his integrity. He is dismissed from the college in disgrace.
2. The rest of the book is about how Lurie comes to accept his disgrace and transcend it. Having no place to go, he moves in with his daughter, Lucy, who has a "smallholding," a little farm on the East Cape. She runs a kennel and grows flowers and vegetables which she sells at the local market. She calls Lurie by his first name--there isn't much of a father/daughter relationship left. She has heard of "David's" troubles. In a remarkable passage, he explains to her why he gave everything up rather than accept the censure of the college morality board. He asks Lucy whether she recalls a dog that belonged to a neighbor when Lucy was a small child:
'It was a male. Whenever there was a bitch in the vicinity it would get excited and unmanageable, and with Pavlovian regularity the owners would beat it. This went on until the poor dog didn't know what to do. At the smell of a bitch it would chase around the garden with its ears flat and its tail between its legs, whining, trying to hide.'
He pauses. "I don't see the point," says Lucy. And indeed what is the point?
"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 instinct unchecked. Is that the moral?'
"No, this 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.
'Or to have it fixed.'
'Perhaps. But at the deepest level I think it might have preferred being shot. It might have preferred that to the options it was offered: on the one hand, to deny its nature, on the other, to spend the rest of its days padding about the living-room, sighing and sniffing the cat and getting portly.'
"Have you always felt that way, David?
'No, not always. Sometimes I have felt just the opposite. That desire is a burden we could well do without.'
'I must say," says Lucy, "That is a view I incline toward myself.'
page 90
Lucy has obviously inherited her father's intelligence; she's even more of an enigma. The child, to paraphrase Wordsworth, becomes the mother of the man--by the end of the book, Lurie accepts his daughter's view that "desire is a burden we could well do without." What compensates for the loss of this (glorious?) burden is that Lurie begins to care for others. The learning of empathy is perhaps the most difficult task for a narcissist; Lurie, under duress, does indeed make spiritual progress. He has given up any desire to mold Lucy according to his wishes. He accepts her. It is not easy; Lucy has grown portly, a trait her father detests. She had been living as a couple with a woman who has left, apparently never to return. This, if one reads between the lines, has traumatized her. Lucy is also broken like her father; she has given up on any desire for happiness in the conventional sense. All she wants is to be left alone in the country with her dogs, of which she is very fond. (An essay could be written about the canine symbolism in this book. Are they the objects of compassion--even love--on the part of those who have been reduced by society to being dogs themselves? Are they emblems of good beings ignored and abused by corrupt ones? What else?)
Poor Lurie has little to do with his time; he decides to work at a local ramshackle veterinary clinic where he is the assistant to a woman named Bev Shaw. He finds her at first physically repulsive--a dumpy, poorly dressed woman with "no neck"--the very opposite of Melanie Isaacs. He soon learns that she, unlike Melanie, is not bland on the inside; we learn by the way she treats animals that she is quite compassionate. She is also sex-starved and lonely. He eventually has sex with her too, but with a major difference: for perhaps the first time he has sex with a woman not to please himself, but to please her. Things are changing.
It is now Lucy's turn to be disgraced. She is brutally raped by three men, who had locked up Lurie in the bathroom before attacking his daughter. After they're done, they return to Lurie to get the keys to the car so they can steal it. After this, they set him on fire. He escapes with minor injuries, but his hair is gone--the ironic reference to Samson is obvious. This is the low point of his daughter's--and also of her now loving father's--lives. On this tragedy he poignantly reflects that he can speak French and Italian, but had not been able to protect what is most important to him, the welfare of his daughter.
Lucy has decided to stay on the farm, no matter what--she apparently has given everything else up and has no other hopes for the future than to be left alone with her dogs. Since the end of apartheid, however, it has become much more dangerous to live on an isolated farm--especially for whites, not to mention for a single white woman. She needs protection. She has hired someone, a black man named Petrus, whose ambition it is to take over everything. She knows this, and assents to it, provided that she be allowed to live in her house and maintain the kennels. Petrus, almost always on the farm, has mysteriously disappeared during the
rape. The implication is that Petrus was behind the attack; he wanted to humiliate her and make her realize that she cannot survive without his protection. She is shocked by the hate of her assailants. (The long era of apartheid was not particularly good for race relations!) Petrus's involvement is made more likely by the fact that one of the men turns out to be a relative and begins to live on the property. Lurie is furious and wants to call the police. She forbids this; she knows that she would not be able to stay on the farm if Petrus's relative is charged with rape. Even worse: she soon finds out she has been impregnated by one of the three men, which one she doesn't know. The deal she eventually works out is this: she will marry Petrus, provided that he allows her to live in the house alone and continue the services she supplies for the dogs. He will own the entire property. The farm has become her only refuge; she will do almost anything--except becoming Petrus's mistress--to remain there. Most people would view her as being at least as stubborn as her father, equally unable to look out for her own interests.
Lurie is determined to take his daughter out of danger; he moves back to his flat in the city in the hope that he and his daughter will live there as they did when she was a child. Neighbors shun him. The university has replaced him and forgotten about him. It's not going to work. He decides to move back and rent a flat near his daughter.
On the way back he stops at the house of Melanie's parents. He abjectly apologizes--he gets down on this hands and knees and bows down. Yes, a rather extreme way to say you're sorry, but Lurie, as is his daughter, is given to extremes and has probably never really apologized before. A comical element is that Melanie's father is convinced that he's doing this to obtain their help to get him reinstated at the college. He can't imagine that Lurie is just apologizing and has no ulterior motives.
The ending of the novel is particularly beautiful. He is back volunteering at the animal clinic, helping Bev euthanize unwanted animals. This is hard on her; she loves animals. She reasons that if they must die, they should at least die at the hands of someone who treats them with compassion. Lurie, who has learned this compassion through her, has befriended a crippled dog, one who must drag his hindquarters behind him as he walks. They develop an inordinate affection for each other. One day, the dogs that were to be euthanized that day are all already dead. Lurie's dog is the only one left. This is how the novel ends:
He crosses the surgery. "Was that the last?" asks Bev Shao.
"One more."
He opens the cage door. 'Come,' he says, bends, opens his arms. The dog wags its crippled rear, sniffs his face, licks his cheeks, his lips, his ears. He does nothing to stop it. 'Come.'
Bearing him in his arms like a lamb, he re-enters the surgery. "I thought you would save him for another week,' says Bev Shaw. 'Are you giving him up?'
"Yes, I am giving him up.'
4.
This great novel is a story of redemption after all, but not of a Christian sort--Lurie is a lapsed Christian. He is a Buddhist even if he is unaware of it. He obtains something very similar if not identical to Nirvana at the end, the peace that comes with the extinction of desire. He doesn't even have the desire to spare the dog he loves for a week; the dog is doomed and he will not prolong its misery just because he is fond of it. His needs are no longer paramount.I don't think he will now become anything like the drifter in the first quote or like the miserable dog in the second. I think he will go on to be a good grandfather--certainly better than he has been as a father!
Lurie is now a master of the four cardinal virtues of Buddhism called the Brahma Vihara:
1. Karuna--compassion--something new for him. He has completely triumphed over his narcissism. A touching example of his compassion and new humility is that he now takes the dead dogs in bags to the incinerator. He is there to assure that workers don't strike the bags with shovels--the dogs are in a state of rigor mortis and would fit in the incinerator better if the contents of the bags were beaten into a smaller size--like garbage. He is there to assure a modicum of dignity. No one will notice. . Yes, he has learned karuna well..
2. Metta-love. Love has replaced lust and self-absorption in his life. His love for his daughter, the animals and others--including his unborn grandson-- is obvious by the end of the book.
3. Muditha--sympathetic joy, the joy in other people's success, Mitfreude, the opposite of Schadenfreude, Buddhism, as far as I know, is the only system that emphasizes this virtue--or even has a name for it. The Buddhists thought that compassion was to be given freely to those less fortunate--it is not enough. The ego must be humbled further by love of those more fortunate--resulting in the destruction of envy and jealousy. Actually, Lurie has not been a jealous person--he had been too self-absorbed for that. He now has opportunities, however, for a more active role of muditha.
4. Uphekkha--Serenity. He no longer bears the burden of untoward desire. He has gained inner serenity which cannot help but make the world--even his much reduced world--a better place. He has lost almost everything, but what remains will be enough. He no longer has to chase rainbows; he is now at home on the earth and accepts his place.
A happy ending--of sorts. (Buddhists are allowed to have friends!)
This might not be the only possible interpretation of the novel, but is indeed a valid one.. Coetzee is a subtle author, and, just like life, indicates what is important without providing a manual.
I have been deeply affected by this extraordinary novel. Uncompromising devotion to a speck of inner integrity, pressed by experience into a diamond, can indeed reflect the light of the sun, the light of the entire world.
.
Thomas Dorsett
You are welcome to read book review of the Baltimore Online Bookclub by googling the title of the novel along with my full name.
1. The New Life by Orhan Pamuk
2..Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
Our next meeting will take place on April 3, 2014. The six member of our group will discuss the novel, A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter, on that date; I will post my review shorty after we meet, You are invited to read the book, followed by the review, and, if you wish, post your comments onto the blog. I wish you pleasurable reading!
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