Sink like a Stone: Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

The opening chapters of Disgrace infuriated me. There, our protagonist David Lurie, 52, was demoted from his tenured professorship in Classics and Modern Languages as the department closed and is now adjunct professor of Communications at Cape Technical University in Cape Town. While the novel is set in the late 90’s South Africa post-apartheid, its critique of our pseudo-utilitarian capitalist hellscape remains in the background, artfully subdued. This is not the focus here. Rather, the initial plot impulse revolves around David’s sordid forced affair with his 20-year-old student Melanie, and the public disgrace he suffers after the university committee is forced to fire him after he treats the ordeal more as inconvenience than reckoning.

The parallels with Lolita seem inevitable. David is no Humbert Humbert, not quite as melodramatic and needlessly eloquent in his self-lamentation, albeit rather implacable in his self-righteousness. Melanie is no Lolita. First off, she is 20, there is legally no pedophilia here, no ‘ephebophilia’ even, for the weirdos caring about the distinction. Melanie is, in the eyes of the law, a fully-fledged adult, capable to make her own decisions, capable to be coerced, wordlessly pressured into sexual intercourse, raped, by a much older white man in a direct position of power over her. And, well, Coetzee is no Nabokov. Where H.H and Nabokov are effusive, David and Coetzee are charming, subtly so. No fireworks, comical grandiloquence, or jaw-dropping, erudite paragraphs.

What we have here rather is a gentle guidance into moral ambiguity.

This very ambiguity, kept afloat by sticking to David’s perspective over the diverse incidents of this book was what made it similarly stomach-churning to me. His lyricism, romanticism of the affair is limited, at least compared to Humbert, and the moral quandary of considering some form of agency from Lolita takes on a different shape, as Melanie is expected to know better than to apathetically surrender to David’s insistence on a sexual relationship.

Yet how real these chapters felt, how realistic Melanie’s helplessness. Where H.H. & Lolita’s dynamics felt at best far-fetched, often absurd, David and Melanie felt disgustingly mundane, commonplace, especially in 90’s academia, something hopefully less usual in 2026, but the mechanisms of power abuse and sexual coercion transcend time and space. David’s rationalization of what he deemed an ‘affair’ (liberally benefiting from the implication of equal participation and agency present in the word to sustain the cognitive dissonance he needs to live with himself and the way he’s led his life thus far), is more old fashioned than quaint, a relic of a time that is a-changing, and David would much rather sink like a stone than start swimming.

Had David been so unidimensionally immoral, so utterly removed from humane amorous qualities, the novel would have won no Booker Prize and this article would have had no impetus. Not only does David turn out to be fully fleshed out, his entanglements with Love entirely in accordance to the literary conventions of the Great Works of the Western Canon (incidentally, about 90% of which was written was wealthy white men), but also deeply human, and, at times infuriatingly, relatable.

Take the following extract on page 182:

Yet the very idea of reapplying to Melanie is crazy. Why should she speak to the man condemned as her persecutor? And what will she think of him anyway – the dunce with the funny ear, the uncut hair, the rumpled collar?
The marriage of Cronus and Harmony: unnatural. That was what the trial was set up to punish, once all the fine words were stripped away. On trial for his way of life. For unnatural acts: for broadcasting old seed, tired seed, seed that does not quicken, contra naturam. If the old men hog the young women, what will be the future of the species? That, at bottom, was the case for the prosecution.
Half of literature is about it: young women struggling to escape from under the weight of old men, for the sake of the species. He sighs. The young in one another’s arms, heedless, engrossed in the sensual music. No country, this, for old men. He seems to be spending a lot of time sighing. Regret: a regrettable note on which to go out.

Self-awareness warrants no absolution.

The lyricism above could have been written by (for) Humbert Humbert, had it not been for the awareness of malfeasance, that his ‘infatuation’ for Melanie was unnatural (note the repetition here ‘crazy’, ‘unnatural’ x2, and finally ‘contra naturam’, as if only Latin could hammer the point home).

His world remains theoretical, literary, his pseudo-repentence or any glimpses of it, are tied to literary crimes, or of old men’s (never David’s) against the species, still erasing Melanie entirely, projecting upon her the legions of women ‘adored’ by men throughout -literary- history, in whose alleged names unspeakable atrocities were committed, when in truth, they were but mere place-holders for lustful, power-hungry men who mistook conquest for raison d’être .

No country for old men, indeed. Something he only realizes not after he is dismissed from his academic position, but only after his daughter is raped while her assailants light the bathroom he is locked in for protection on fire, scorching his scalp and disfiguring him in the process.

His lament remains about himself, his life, his regrets, as his legacy is defined by this crime against literature, never taking direct responsibility for his actions thanks to that distancing, let alone atoning, at least in thoughts, for the irreversible damage he has so casually inflicted upon Melanie.

Page 192 below stands as David stoking his inner fire, excusing his disgrace with an attempt at passionately recollecting his past encounters,

Without warning a memory comes back from years ago: of someone he picked up on the N1 outside Trompsburg and gave a ride to, a woman in her twenties traveling alone, a tourist from Germany, sunburnt and dusty. They drove as far as Touws River, checked into a hotel; he fed her, slept with her. He remembers her long, wiry legs; he remembers the softness of her hair, its feather-lightness between his fingers.

In a sudden and soundless eruption, as if he has fallen into a waking dream, a stream of images pours down, images of women he has known on two continents, some from so far away in time that he barely recognizes them. Like leaves blown on the wind, pell-mell, they pass before him. A fair field full of folk: hundreds of lives all tangled with his. He holds his breath, willing the vision to continue.

What has happened to them, all those women, all those lives? Are there moments when they too, or some of them, are plunged without warning into the ocean of memory? The German girl: is it possible that at this very instant she is remembering the man who picked her up on the roadside in Africa and spent the night with her?

Enriched: that was the word the newspapers picked on to jeer at. A stupid word to let slip, under the circumstances, yet now, at this moment, he would stand by it. By Melanie, by the girl in Touws River; by Rosalind, Bev Shaw, Soraya: by each of them he was enriched, and by the others too, even the least of them, even the failures. Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness.

Where do moments like this come from? Hypnagogic, no doubt; but what does that explain? If he is being led, then what god is doing the leading?

Before Melanie there was a hitchhiking German tourist he fed and bedded. What could he possibly have done, after all? He is but a mere puppet, led on a string by a mysterious Byronic God. His sole focus the ‘enrichment’ of his soul, confused with the quenching of his lust.

And yes, ‘Like leaves blown on the wind’ is poetic, those feelings of one’s ‘heart flooding with thankfulness’ are very human, beautiful even, can be felt for simple transitory interactions, for those entering your life abruptly and leaving just as promptly, alongside an indelible mark on your soul, on your story. I would not trust David to see Beauty if it slapped him in the face.

A few pages later, he has the gall (but then again, audacity requires awareness, his awareness is only terse, literary…) to stalk Melanie at her theater performance, utterly unconscious of the harm this experience caused her, her reputation, and how much strength, willpower it takes her to be able to perform in public again, let alone the risk of the shock she would receive at seeing her abuser in the crowd that night. Melanie’s boyfriend Ryan throws pellets at David until he is forced to leave the theater, and the following exchange outside:

Ryan draws on his cigarette. ‘Only doing you a favour, prof. Didn’t you learn your lesson?’

‘What was my lesson?’

‘Stay with your own kind.’

Your own kind: who is this boy to tell him who his kind are? What does he know of the force that drives the utmost strangers into each other’s arms, making them kin, kind, beyond all prudence? Omnis gens quaecumque se in se perficere vult. The seed of generation, driven to perfect itself, driving deep into the woman’s body, driving to bring the future into being. Drive, driven.

Ryan is speaking. ‘Let her alone, man! Melanie will spit in your eye if she sees you.’

He drops his cigarette, takes a step closer. Under stars so bright one might think them on fire they face each other.

‘Find yourself another life, prof. Believe me.’

He drives back slowly along the Main Road in Green Point. Spit in your eye: he had not expected that. His hand on the steering wheel is trembling. The shocks of existence: he must learn to take them more lightly. The streetwalkers are out in numbers; at a traffic light one of them catches his eye, a tall girl in a minute black leather skirt. Why not, he thinks, on this night of revelations?

They park in a cul-de-sac on the slopes of Signal Hill. The girl is drunk or perhaps on drugs: he can get nothing coherent out of her. Nonetheless, she does her work on him as well as he could expect. Afterwards she lies with her face in his lap, resting. She is younger than she had seemed under the streetlights, younger even than Melanie. He lays a hand on her head. The trembling has ceased. He feels drowsy, contented; also strangely protective.

So this is all it takes!, he thinks. How could I ever have forgotten it? Not a bad man but not good either. Not cold but not hot, even at his hottest. Not by the measure of Teresa; not even by the measure of Byron. Lacking in fire. Will that be the verdict on him, the verdict of the universe and its all-seeing eye?

The girl stirs, sits up. ‘Where are you taking me?’ she mumbles.

‘I’m taking you back to where I found you.’

I hope you get the sense of my frustration, dear reader. After all this, his only takeaway is that he is not fiery enough, not passionate enough to measure up to his Byron. The pale fire within, an affront to that paragon of literature.

Yet another entry in the great literary tradition of confused old men rejecting reality, finding refuge in books to shield themselves from ignominy. David is, in the worst ways, far more Byron and Humbert Humbert than Don Quixote, who at least had the decency to largely spare Dulcinea his delusions.

His ultimate disgrace lies in spite of a society that eagerly tried to keep him afloat during his scandal. He simply rejects the buoy, refusing even to acknowledge that he cannot swim, for no noble reason other than having only ever known dry land, utterly blind to the rising tide.

Well, sink away David. This is no country for desiccated old men, as charming as they allegedly might be.