Miscegenation, Desire and Rape: The Shifting Ground of Disgrace

Abstract

Summary I discuss three novels that draw on different forms of sexual contact across the colour line, namely Turbott Wolfe by William Plomer ([1926]1976), Alan Paton's (1953) Too Late the Phalarope and Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999). These novels respectively explore miscegenation, interracial sex, and interracial rape. What unites these narratives is their anatomisation of the response in white society to such sexual encounter, crucially indicting sexual contact as a social trope that defines relationships of power. Despite its recurrence, the trope is nonetheless responsive to societal change. An obvious and yet significant difference is that in the postapartheid society represented in Disgrace, interracial sex is not forbidden. I argue that the convention of interracial sexual contact within white South African writing is structured around the signifier “transgression”, and that J.M. Coetzee retains this signifier as a point of reference within the trope, by shifting its overt content from interracial desire to interracial rape. I further consider the formal duplicity of Disgrace, whereby racialised discourse embedded in the realist facet of the narrative is not erased or subsumed by its metafictional properties.