Coetzee's Disgrace: Byron in Italy and the Eastern Cape c. 1820

Abstract

Despite the prominence of Coetzee's prize-winning novel Disgrace (1999) in discussions of “new” South African fiction, to date there has been little interest in examining either Coetzee's choice of landscape in this novel, or the literary-biographical sub-plot of his Romantic scholar protagonist, David Lurie. What does the colonial history of British settlement have to do with Coetzee's pointedly new South African novel? And how does the story of Byron's exile in Italy relate to the province that — since 1994 — we officially call the Eastern Cape? In this essay, I discuss these two seemingly unrelated plots, locating Disgrace in the “Discourse of the Cape” that he writes about in his seminal book of essays, White Writing (1988), together with selected and relevant facts from the life and times of Lord Byron. I argue that, by featuring Byron during his time in Italy, Coetzee's novel highlights a radical romanticism, which offers a challenge to the British romantic tradition that simultaneously established itself at the Cape c. 1820, and still has resonance today.