Can We Be Friends Here? Visitation and Hospitality in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace

Abstract

In his 1999 novel, Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee deals with both the perspicuous and subtle ways in which personal relationships in post-apartheid South Africa are conditioned by the persistent and entrenched legacy of apartheid and of centuries of racial inequality and oppression. However, and it is here that my analysis differs from those racialised readings the novel has received, Disgrace points to the fallacies of post-1994 ‘rainbowism’ by showing that inter-racial conflict is just one among the many others at work in South African society: the novel is pervaded by acts of violent intrusion that highlight the hostility and lack of understanding not only between blacks and whites, but also between different social groups such as landowners and tenants, country people and people from the city, men and women, parents and children, the old and the young, religious and non-religious people, and between human beings and animals. Simultaneously, we encounter acts of friendly visitation and hospitality that, on a more optimistic note, point to the possibility of creating a new community on the land in South Africa. Since unequal power relations in South Africa have been very much dependent on an unfair distribution and zealous possession of the land, Disgrace also suggests that the right relation to the land is that of the person who, instead of creating bonds of rooted attachment with it, adopts the stance of the visitor or guest. In order to justify my arguments, I will be often appealing to the textual immanence of the novel, in particular to over-lexicalisation and lexical repetition, central devices to which critics have not paid enough attention and which constitute explicit clues as to how to read this intensely self-reflexive novel.