Coetzee’s Purgatorial Africa: The Case of Disgrace

Abstract

In this chapter, Coetzee’s Disgrace is placed in the context of those other modern European literary constructions of sub-equatorial Africa that project the subcontinent as a purgatorial space beyond the pre-modern options of the infernal and paradisiacal. This high-cultural intertext, mediated by the hero’s (cultivated) consciousness, deserve as much weight as the contemporary historical transformation of South Africa, seen here as replaying some of the motifs of its early colonial beginnings. In the old frontier territory to which he goes after his “disgrace”, Lurie encounters the new temporal “frontier” of decolonization. The chapter moves on to anchor this wider argument textually in: first, a description of the novel’s narrative mode as a stylistic hybrid; and second, the hero’s habit of inwardly experimenting with the shapes and meanings of words. South Africa’s late entry into Africa propels Lurie into a dissidence beyond the grand design of “nation building”; he becomes a minister of rites which are at best tangential to that design’s imperatives, and which elude even his sophisticated verbal grasp. We are given “Africa” as the synonym for an afterlife at once of searing hurt and quietly glowing vision.