‘He can burn, he can die’: Disgrace’s Figuration of a Figureless Nation

Abstract

Though Disgrace is commonly thought to lack the allegorical aspects that appear in some of Coetzee's earlier fictions, the novel in fact employs an extended trope that represents the post-Apartheid South Africa that David Lurie encounters as a nation where figuration itself has been largely proscribed and only literal language is deemed legitimate. Lurie's involuntary re-education amidst a linguistic landscape devoid of metaphor is both a way of divesting him of his racial, gender, and species privilege, and a method of depicting allegorically the experience of being rendered superfluous by the forces of historical change.