Disgrace - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and the Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa's highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and the Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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ONE

FOR. A MAN of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind,solved the problem of sex rather well. On Thursday afternoons hedrives to Green Point. Punctually at two p.m. he presses the buzzerat the entrance to Windsor Mansions, speaks his name, and enters.Waiting for him at the door of No. II3 is Soraya. He goes straightthrough to the bedroom, which is pleasant-smelling and softly lit,and undresses. Soraya emerges from the bathroom, drops her robe,slides into bed beside him. 'Have you missed me?' she asks. 'I missyou all the time,' he replies. He strokes her honey-brown body,unmarked by the sun; he stretches her out, kisses her breasts; theymake love.

Soraya is tall and slim, with long black hair and dark, liquid eyes.Technically he is old enough to be her father; but then,technically, one can be a father at twelve. He has been on herbooks for over a year; he finds her entirely satisfactory. In thedesert of the week Thursday has become an oasis of luxe et velupté.

In bed Soraya is not effusive. Her temperament is in fact ratherquiet, quiet and docile. In her general opinions she is surprisinglymoralistic. She is offended by tourists who bare their breasts('udders', she calls them) on public beaches; she thinks vagabondsshould be rounded up and put to work sweeping the streets. How she reconciles her opinions with her line of business he does not ask.

Because he takes pleasure in her, because his pleasure isunfailing, an affection has grown up in him for her. To somedegree, he believes, this affection is reciprocated. Affection maynot be love, but it is at least its cousin. Given their unpromisingbeginnings, they have been lucky, the two of them: he to havefound her, she to have found him.

His sentiments are, he is aware, complacent, even uxorious.Nevertheless he does not cease to hold to them.

For a ninety-minute session he pays her R4oo, of which halfgoes to Discreet Escorts. It seems a pity that Discreet Escortsshould get so much. But they own No. II3 and other flats inWindsor Mansions; in a sense they own Soraya too, this part ofher, this function.

He has toyed with the idea of asking her to see him in her owntime. He would like to spend an evening with her, perhaps even awhole night. But not the morning after. He knows too muchabout himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will becold, surly, impatient to be alone.

That is his temperament. His temperament is not going to change,he is too old for that. His temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body.

Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, he would notdignity it with that name. It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict.He is in good health, his mind is clear. By profession he is, orhas been, a scholar, and scholarship still engages, intermittently, thecore of him. He lives within his income, within his temperament,within his emotional means. Is he happy? By most measurements,yes, he believes he is. However, he has not forgotten the lastchorus of Oedipus: Call no man happy until he is dead.

In the field of sex his temperament, though intense, has neverbeen passionate. Were he to choose a totem, it would be the snake.Intercourse between Soraya and himself must be, he imagines, rather like the copulation of snakes: lengthy, absorbed, but ratherabstract, rather dry, even at its hottest.

Is Soraya's totem the snake too? No doubt with other men shebecomes another woman: lu donna é mobile. Yet at the level oftemperament her affinity with him can surely not be feigned.Though by occupation she is a loose woman he trusts her,within limits. During their sessions he speaks to her with a certainfreedom, even on occasion unburdens himself She knows the factsof his life. She has heard the stories of his two marriages, knowsabout his daughter and his daughter's ups and downs. She knowsmany of his opinions.

Of her life outside Windsor Mansions Soraya reveals nothing.Soraya is not her real name, that he is sure of. There are signs shehas borne a child, or children. It may be that she is not aprofessional at all. She may work for the agency only one or twoafternoons a week, and for the rest live a respectable life in thesuburbs, in Rylands or Athlone. That would be unusual for aMuslim, but all things are possible these days.

About his own job he says little, not wanting to-bore her. Heearns his living at the Cape Technical University, formerly CapeTown University College. Once a professor of modern languages,he has been, since Classics and Modern Languages were closeddown as part of the great rationalization, adjunct professor ofcommunications. Like all rationalized personnel, he is allowed tooffer one special-field course a year, irrespective of enrolment,because that is good for morale. This year he is offering a course inthe Romantic poets. For the rest he teaches Communications I0I,'Communication Skills' and Communications 20I, 'AdvancedCommunication Skills'.

Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, hefinds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications I0Ihandbook, preposterous: 'Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings andintentions to each other.' His own opinion, which he does not air,is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song inthe need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather emptyhuman soul.

In the course of a career stretching back a quarter of a centuryhe has published three books, none of which has caused a stir oreven a ripple: the first on opera (Boito and the Faust Legend: TheGenesis of Mefistofele), the second on vision as eros (The Vision ofRichard of St. Victor), the third on Wordsworth and history(Wordsworth and the Burden of the Post}.

In the past few years he has been playing with the idea of a workon Byron. At first he had thought it would be another book,another critical opus. But all his sallies at writing it have boggeddown in tedium. The truth is, he is tired of criticism, tired of' prosemeasured by the yard. What he wants to write is music: Byron inItaly, a meditation on love between the sexes in the form of achamber opera.

Through his mind, while he faces his Communications classes, fit phrases, tunes, fragments of song from the unwritten work. Hehas never been much of a teacher; in this transformed and, to hismind, emasculated institution of learning he is more out of place than ever. But then, so are other of his colleagues from the olddays, burdened with upbringings inappropriate to the tasks they areset to perform; clerks in a post-religious age.

Because he has no respect for the material he teaches, he makesno impression on his students. They look through him when hespeaks, forget his name. Their indifference galls him more than hewill admit. Nevertheless he fulfils to the letter his obligationstoward them, their parents, and the state. Month after month hesets, collects, reads, and annotates their assignments, correctinglapses in punctuation, spelling and usage, interrogating weak arguments, appending to each paper a brief, considered critique.

He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood;also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him whohe is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the onewho comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those whocome to learn learn nothing. It is a feature of his profession onwhich he does not remark to Soraya. He doubts there is an ironyto match it in hers.

In the kitchen of the flat in Green Point there are a kettle, plasticcups, a jar of instant coffee, a bowl with sachets of sugar. Therefrigerator holds a supply of bottled water. In the bathroom thereis soap and a pile of towels, in the cupboard clean bed linen....