Metamorphosis and Sexuality: Reading the Strange Passions of Disgrace

Abstract

This essay investigates the processes of change in Disgrace as they are articulated through sexuality and related to the sociopolitical shifts underway in postapartheid South Africa. I argue that sexuality becomes a trope in the novel for wider historical changes: a way of engaging the complex social relations of the "new" South Africa and relating them to the conventional assumptions of the past. Through his protagonist Lurie, a literary scholar, Coetzee situates both sexual desire and social transformation in the epistemological framework of the Western intellectual tradition: the novel's many references to literary works and myth activate this framework. By examining sexuality specifically in the perspective of these allusions, I show that Coetzee's vision of change is inseparable from the unresolved destiny of Anglo-European traditions in South Africa, as well as from the ghosts of colonialism and the modes of knowledge and representation that it bequeathed.