Friday 14 June 2013

The Outsider / Camus and Coetzee


The Outsider Transposed: The legacy of Camus in South Africa





It is the purpose of this essay to argue that J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace can be considered as a postcolonial elaboration on the concerns of Camus' The Outsider. Both novels are bound up with issues surrounding colonisation or its legacies. Both novels offer us central protagonists who transgress social rules, partly via an act of violence, but also in a sustained failing to observe the ritualised conventions of social behaviour, who then come to an existential point of contemplation of death, from which they reflect. Both works demonstrate tension between the freedom of the individual, and subjection to socio-historical pressures. Finally, both demonstrate secular society as essentially religious in its structures concerning freedom and transgression.


Camus' novel is set in pre-WW2 Algeria, Coetzee's in a post-apartheid South Africa in which insecure whites are struggling with guilt (or the absence of guilt), finding themselves under threat from the movement of a history of which they are no longer the authors. Both novels open in the city (Algiers; Cape Town) and locate us with an individual whom the narrative never leaves. From the city, journeys into the real country are made and returned from, albeit to white outposts within that interior: the old person's home, the beach house, Lucy's farm, the animal hospital. By the end of Disgrace, Lurie sees the country and all it entails coming "inexorably" into Cape Town, that city of security gates. In both novels, effective communication between whites and Arabs, whites and blacks, seems impossible.


The Outsider is a first person account with a sparse, unemotional, declarative style:
"Mother died today. Or, maybe yesterday, I can't be sure. The telegram from the home says: Your mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Deep sympathy."
The opening lines seem to mimic the direct form of the telegram that Merseult invokes in his uncertainty about the time of death. The phrase "Deep sympathy" is a formal convention as an expression of feeling, but is an example of observance of a social norm which means little - except when absent. It could also be read as a truncated imperative, denoting compulsory observance. Merseult's failing in the eyes of society is his failure to observe norms of displayed emotion, to act in terms of abstractions. Merseult is able to borrow appropriate dress for the funeral (though he is perhaps prompted to do this "at the last moment"), but cannot so easily achieve the requisite emotional display. He is, it is implied, convicted not for the murder he commits but because he does not weep at his mother's funeral. When he suggests to his lawyer that his mother's death is an irrelevance, the reply from his "revolted" consul is the "remark showed [he had] never had any dealings with the law." When Merseult finally does come to understand what he calls his guilt, it is an understanding that people hate him for his lack of conventional emotional display. It comes as a surprise to him, as it did previously when he learnt from Raymond that he had been criticised for allowing his mother to go to a home, a decision he characteristically saw in purely pragmatic terms and which may indeed have been the best one. When Marie asks him if he loves her, he replies "that sort of question has no meaning, really", and whilst he registers she "looked sad", he does not speculate on her emotion. In place of his apparent lack of emotional depth he is extremely sensuous. His unconventionality is summarised when his employer offers him promotion to Paris. He turns it down, causing his employer to say Merseult "lacked ambition, a grave defect, to his mind" (here Camus is punning on "grave" with reference to Merseult's conduct at the funeral and its consequences). Conversely, Merseult has previously complained to his employer about the wetness of the towel in the staff w.c. in the afternoons, which spoils the enjoyment he derives from washing and drying his hands; to his bemused employer's mind "a mere detail". Merseult's susceptibility to sensuality and absorption in the present moment of experience is, we are given to believe, the reason for the murder. We are told in a passage rich in metaphors of sensation, the heat and the stress of the day were "pressing on [his] back" until the trigger simply "gave"; the will relaxed, sensation passively accepted.


The extent to which Merseult is aware of his deficiency is ambiguous. He relates: "As a student I'd had plenty of ambition of the kind he meant", implying he understands his employer's concept, and therefore implying his refusal of such abstractions, and his refusal to create a self-for-others, is willed, and the result of some existential epiphany probably caused by the termination of his study and the obscure reasons behind it. What Merseult does not fully realise at first is the abhorrence his character stirs in others, though sometimes he becomes paranoid: he "had a feeling" his employer blamed him for his conduct towards his mother, and presciently feels at the vigil "an absurd impression that [the old people from the home] had come to sit in judgement" on him. He also says he "caught himself thinking" his mother's death had spoiled his day rather. The phrase implies that the self and the self-for-others are different levels of consciousness, the task of the social self is to monitor and mediate the authentic self. Merseult is partly unable, partly unwilling to do this as others do, recognising in many instances that denial of the authentic self might be termed hypocrisy. The novel argues that hypocrisy (the expression of regret one does not feel) is demanded by society. Merseult's fate represents Camus' pessimistic view of society's insistence on the observance of social convention, on the normal type. For Camus, however, Merseult is able to become possessed of freedom through acceptance of his condemnation. The contemplation whilst alive of the necessity of death is the ultimate example of the absurd, as Camus states "Death and Absurdity are the principles which generate the only rational liberty, that which a human being can experience with body and soul."


Disgrace opens with the subjective assertion the Lurie "has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well". We assume that sex is a problem for Lurie, fifty-two and twice divorced, because it is burdensome, a physical requirement, yet a part of life society finds distasteful in a man of his age. All his life he has been "a lover of women", when his looks began to fade he became a womaniser out of vain insecurity. Lurie, like Merseult, is preoccupied with the superficial, he regrets his daughter's being overweight and laments the discrepancy in looks between Bev Shaw and his former mistresses. Like Merseult, his sex drive rules him – Thursday afternoons are an "oasis" in the "desert" of the week, as Mersault talks of waiting "patiently all week till Sunday for a spell of lovemaking". Like Merseult he is sensuous, noting that the bedroom at no.113 is "pleasant-smelling and softly lit". Both of these attributes are intended to disguise the unpleasant smells or sights entailed in this place of business, but Lurie is as unconcerned by this as he is with his ethical position in paying for the services of a prostitute. Any misgivings are complacently dispelled: "Technically he is old enough to be her [Soraya's] father, but then, technically, one can be a father at twelve." He is aware of his complacency but this awareness does nothing to dispel it. He has retreated into rehearsed, repeated, and self-justifying maxims:
"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."
It is as though Lurie is familiar with what he might see as lessons of The Outsider, but employs them as self-justifying and exclusive of social realities. A lack of guilt about enjoyment of the female body, exemplified in Merseult, is an ideal which conveniently ignores the harsh economics of prostitution. He is inclined, with some justification, to see his treatment by the university as similar to Merseult's own trial, but his lack of respect for the public nature of his hearing is also inevitably an offence to the wronged party (Melanie and her parents). Lurie consistently invokes literature in defence of his proclivities, reaching a zenith of insensibility when he quotes Blake at Lucy: "'Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.'" His sexual self-justification is abhorrent to a society which promotes willed negation of instinct, or at least the idea that instinct should find its outlet in secret. The attack on his daughter and himself, in which he receives a blow to both the skull and the temperament, disprove his oft repeated assertion that he is too old to change; that "one can be a father at twelve" grimly foreshadows Lucy's pregnancy, the involvement of the trainee rapist mocking his earlier flippant self-justification. It is possible to consider Disgrace as a novel framed by "the problem of sex". Coetzee hints that we should view the young, healthy, and therefore sexually potent dog Lurie has a special fondness for, "the one who likes music", as figurative of Lurie's own sexuality. Lurie's sacrifice of this dog at the close of the novel, "bearing him in his arms like a lamb", when he had previously decided to keep him for another week, is the sacrifice of his own sexuality, a metaphorical self-castration – a possibility explicitly, if not seriously, considered elsewhere. Lurie reverses Blake's injunction in murdering unacted desire.


Merseult and Lurie share characteristics: sensuality, a refusal to participate in the hypocrisies of society, and the denial of abstractions (in Lurie's case this denial is partial and self-serving, it is more evident in his daughter). They are given, by a partly sympathetic system, which is colonial or residually colonial and so skewed in their favour, the opportunity to express penance in social terms, opportunities which both refuse. They are punished for their insistence on an integrity which society cannot accept. In this sense both novels take a view of society as having replaced the rituals of religion with secular alternatives, whose observance is even more mandated. Coetzee's novel extends Camus' premise as Lurie goes on to become with his daughter the victim of a violent crime. He struggles to accept his daughter's conduct after that crime, though it is however not dissimilar from his own. Lurie, in what might be termed his reflective phase, is set reparative tasks by himself and his daughter. One is to imagine himself into a female perspective (another is to work for a black man), to consider himself, at the moment of orgasm, as grotesque in the eyes of the female Other. Lurie gradually accepts his tasks, thinking of Lucy's rape not as an abstraction but as an actuality. The concept of Rape becomes an uncomfortable echo of his teaching on Wordsworth's Prelude (when the Romantic, conceptualised mountain is discrepant with reality) – Lurie may no longer be able to deny it is a crime he is guilty of himself. This also coincides with his abstract notion of the countryside, at odds with the reality his daughter lives out. Camus, whose character is also implicated in a sexual crime - the abuse of the Arab girl by Raymond, for whom he gives evidence without qualm - is not interested in pursuing the idea of reparative imagining, Merseult's guilt is simply a social perception. By the end of Disgrace Lurie seems to be making progress with his project of imagining the female. The novel's metafiction, Lurie's planned critical work on Byron, masculine epitome, mutates into an opera, taking final form as an absurdist piece whose central character is not Byron but Teresa.


In The Outsider, the voiceless Arab characters regard Merseult, Marie, and Raymond "in that special way these people have, as if we were blocks of stone or dead trees." Absolutely excluded from civic life, they view the French-Algerians as simple presence, not as entities with whom dialogue is possible - or, at least, this is Merseult's perception. Were an Arab character to have a voice in the novel, the artistic form of the European bourgeoisie, it would structurally negate one of the points being made: Arabs have no recourse to modes of expression whose validity is admitted by the dominant hegemony. The simile is focalised through Merseult's consciousness, and consequently tells us nothing about the Arab self. What it can tell us is something about the colonial consciousness, which can via its existence in the gaze of The Other, gain a perspective upon itself. However, it does not follow that this perspective leads to an authentic sense of self or an ethical code. Merseult, then, feels his presence as an outsider, etranger in the sense of foreigner (the noun can also be translated as stranger and also has a specific African sense of (temporary) guest). Camus wants to show us the injustice of Arab exclusion from the system. No Arab witness participates in the court case, the reason for which is supposedly the murder of an Arab. It is implied Merseult could have easily escaped his charge (which we feel is reluctantly brought by the friendly magistrate as a kind of formality, designed to show that the life of an Arab has legal value, but one which can be easily locally circumvented by procedures in which complicity is assumed) had he conducted his defence with the guile we discover he is incapable of. Merseult becomes an embarrassment to colonialism, which would like to pretend itself civilised and its instances of recourse to violent suppression justified.


If Merseult represents a sacrifice to history, that the majority may be spared retribution, this is exactly how Lurie sees his own predicament. Certainly, his hearing has marked similarities to Merseult's, he seems to be condemned for his lack of remorse. By the time of Disgrace, the trial is more obviously couched in decolonialist historical terms, Rassool invoking "the long history of exploitation of which this is part". Lurie resents this; he could be referring to The Outsider when he sarcastically asks if he must "Shed tears of contrition?", exasperated at having to defend himself against "an image", referring to his undignified newspaper picture. However, Lurie seems to have taken Camus' message and made it serve his own ends.


Both texts centre on a violent eruption which forms a structural division between pre-reflective and reflective phases. For Frantz Fanon, colonialism is "violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence". All aspects of colonialism correspond to this violence, including seemingly liberal concessions, such as the extension of the charge of murder to cover the killing of natives by whites, or the education of natives in European institutions, for which gratitude becomes a kind of enslavement, and which absorbs natives into the dominant culture. The concept of concession, providing a controlled release of pressure, even when well intentioned, cannot be other than part of domination; it reduces revolutionary potential. A Marxist model of historical dynamism prevails in Fanon's thought, the individual can try to assert his individuality in the face of history's violent pendulous swing, but that assertion will be in vain. The inescapability of history is a central motif in Disgrace.


Coetzee explores in his novel the new potentialities of the South African situation, debating whether it is possible to work outside of Fanon's prescriptive model. However much we would like to consider ourselves ahistorical, to refuse the roles history offers us, there will be others who will not accept our proclaimed neutrality (a proclamation which may of course seem motivated by self interest: there is much more benefit to the white who wants to forget the past and begin afresh). Co-existence is the new South African Lucy's ideal, yet, as Fanon predicts, it is an ideal which seems as doomed to violent disillusion as the old settler Ettinger is doomed to violent death, his fate determined by the role history has assigned him and he has accepted. The colonised man has been made envious by colonisation, he wants to take on the settler's affects because he has been denied them. Lucy comes to see her rape, viewable as an act of colonisation in microcosm, as the primary motive behind the attack, she feels the men are "debt collectors", and she must "pay" on behalf of the coloniser, her personal identity irrelevant. Lurie seems of a similar opinion, that "it was history speaking through them", but does not agree that she should feel under obligation to stoically consider herself part of that history. He later says "it is in their interests to make up stories that justify them", inadvertently defining the impulse behind all recorded history, a self-justifying impulse he has been equally guilty of himself. The temptation to see ourselves in the typifying terms of history is strong, and language conspires in the process; Merseult, when he hears a retrospective summation of his actions and character, agrees that it sounds "quite plausible".


Lurie, as a teacher in a post-apartheid university, is arguably part of the system of European cultural domination of Africa. He disdains the new university system, feeling that communication (once "Professor of Classics", his job has undergone rebranding, now "Adjunct Professor of Communications" he is allowed to teach the Romantics only "because that is good for morale"), set forth as an ideal of the new politics, has never been the main object of language, believing instead in an asocial notion of language origin - though understands language may be used as a tool of oppression. He resents the use of the university institution to promote political ideology, and views his poetry course as valuable because it represents knowledge as disassociate with society. However, it is easy for all but Lurie to see the point of view that study of Wordsworth is culturally prescriptive and irrelevant to the Cape Town students. Lurie's book on Wordsworth deals with "the Burden of the Past"; burden being a recurring concept throughout, reflecting the individual's doomed wish to exist outside history. Desire is also described by both father and daughter as "a burden we could well do without".


Ellke Boehmer points to text and the notion of literary canon inherited from Europe as "a vehicle of colonial authority", as part of a general point that European education locates and cements authority outside of Europe, and creates economic conditions exploitable by Europe, thus "the knowledge which made possible the colonized's advance within the colonial system, and furnished the terms of their protest, also acted to entrap them." Lurie, of course, works in a multi-racial institution, but only deals with a certain type of Black or Asian. Later, when he journeys into what he calls in incongruous literary terms "The Heart of Darkness", "darkest Africa", he meets the Other, uncompromised native. Lurie sees himself during his ordeal as "an Aunt Sally", he feels the uselessness of his French and Italian, and retreats into prejudice: "the savages jaw away", resorting to hope or faith in the official procedure he previously shunned. Coetzee does not flinch in his presentation of the scared liberal descending to only partly ironic racism. The atheist Lurie wonders what the work of the missionary, "that huge enterprise of upliftment", has left behind, concluding "nothing that he can see", the irony being that that "enterprise" was precisely that, religion's hand in the economic conquest of the land, and his situation is a direct result of that history.


Boehmer also dwells upon the difficulties of the native or postcolonial settler writer in adapting the novel, a form permeated by colonialism, to express new, local concerns. It is cited as ridiculous that African students would feel more comfortable describing fog or snow, which they had never seen, than local weather. New sources of imagery become a problem; native writers draw on local flora and fauna, settler writers may feel unwelcome taking this option. Imagery in Disgrace is, as we might expect given Lurie's occupation, generally drawn from western sources, though Lucy (though she is focalised though her bewildered father and so to an extent unknowable) needs a slightly different figurative context. Coetzee presents the farm, no longer the idyll, eroded by the ebb of history, as replete with images of decay. He is aware of the cultural shift taking place in the landscape denied to white farmers and writers alike. Stray dogs become a central motif, standing fluidly for the white dispossessed, for abused femininity, for unchanneled male sexuality. As Lucy says, "Dogs still mean something." Other imagery figures the conflation of the religious and the secular, as well as suggesting the roles characters take on. The hospital incinerator rests on the seventh day. Lurie in the opening chapters is variously a worm in an apple (in the colonial Eden), a serpent or viper, a fox. Melanie is a mole, a rabbit. Later Lurie becomes a (scape)goat, a dinosaur.


The text of the both novels is consciously artificial, we are not supposed to imagine Merseult engaged in the act of confessional writing, though his account imitates to an extent the form of a diary, with each chapter dealing retrospectively and in linear temporal fashion with the events of a day or (later, when Merseult is imprisoned and time is less full of sensations) a series of days. Merseult makes no attempt at justification of his actions to the reader in any conventional sense (just as he will not justify himself within the novel through the apparatus of legality offered him). This has the curious effect in a modernist first person narrated novel of making us accept the reliability of Merseult's account, which would normally be under suspicion. Disgrace is narrated in the third person, though perhaps in a comment on the character's similarity to the notionally dominant intellectual - novelist or historian - in terms of ethnicity, education and class, the narrative voice colludes with Lurie, as if he is allowed to narrate himself. Only his thoughts are focalised; the literary allusions that punctuate the book are evidently his. Disgrace's action occurs in the present tense, utterance and enunciation coincide signalling artifice, lending a declarative tone similar to Camus' story. Both novels begin as declarations and become more confessional as the validity of (secular) confession, initially denied as pseudo-religious and hypocritical, is recognised by the protagonists. As in Camus, information about Lurie's past is not furnished unless he is considering it at that moment. At the novel's outset the use of the present tense serves also to emphasise the routines Lurie has constructed for his life: Soraya "asks" if he has missed her, he "replies" that he always misses her, their dialogue unchanging in its comfortable insincerity. Later, as Lurie's insulating irony diminishes, the present tense evokes tension and momentum as the routine is irrevocably disrupted.


The notion of hypocrisy as social necessity is The Outsider's central message, the exclusion of Arabs from the institutions of their country is secondary. If Camus' work is limited, the limitation is deliberate, but does create some problems. The lack of expansion on the fate of the beaten girl has been criticised. This can perhaps be explained by noting, as remarked above, that it would compromise the novel's power if an Arab character were allowed expression within its framework. Far more problematic is the assertion of some critics that Merseult's sensual temperament is essentially Southern. To quote Cyril Connelly as representative, "there is no Nordic why-clause in his pact with nature". Connelly goes on to describe Merseult's sentencing as "typical of a European code of Justice applied to a non-European people". The implication seems to be that those of a "non-European" / "Nordic" temperament should be allowed literally to get away with murder. However, I feel it is nonsensical to propose this as Camus' opinion, it is more useful to see Merseult as a trope, a Christ figure in a secular myth designed to highlight social failings. Misreading of The Outsider occurs, I would argue, as result of the reader feeling sympathy for Merseult. Both novels offer us protagonists we initially are invited to condemn, and then perhaps come to feel sympathy for as they reflect upon themselves. It is possible, however, that both writers, via their presentation of morally dubious central characters call into question the notion of sympathy itself, as a device employed in novels and in history to steer the reader into an interpretation. It can easily be evoked by the skilled writer, but can mislead and enforce complacency; for a white to claim sympathy with an oppressed black is for the white to proclaim 'I would not have acted like the oppressor'. The tenuous nature of sympathy is shown in Lurie's feeling for Petrus' sheep, which under other circumstances he would happily eat. As readers we are being offered the role of observer in court or Cape Town gossip, but to condemn or to sympathise is to over simplify; we should refuse these inauthentic options and instead simply accept, we should not be among the crowd which greets the condemned with "howls of execration".


Disgrace has however drawn criticism from those who see the novel as requiring our sympathy with Lurie. This criticism may stem from a general belief that novels written in countries like South Africa should engage socially. Coetzee is opposed to this notion of the novel. His concern is instead to present not representation of supposed Lukácsian historical types but a narrative of discourse, influenced by setting, but, as David Attwell puts it, with no obvious "centre of authorial intelligence." He is not naïve enough to deny Lucy's statement of inescapability, "this place being South Africa", but has no wish to fashion a polemic. We can therefore see Disgrace in its presentation of characters who wish to exist outside of history, as an expression of the right of the novel to be similarly ahistorical, to not depend on binaries of condemnation or sympathetic acceptance. If we accept this metaphorical reading, that the Luries represent the postmodern postcolonial writer who asserts the ideal of political neutrality, then their fate in the book (for example Lurie's being either ostracised or offered compromise by his unsympathetic / sympathetic colleagues) implies criticism of the institutions of writing and publication in South Africa, which in the late 1980s unashamedly requested the arts to promote the right message (for many it seems a given that in times of crisis the arts can be called upon to disseminate an accepted liberal message). Coetzee tellingly sees the novel as having two options: to supplement history, the weak option, i.e.: to provide a personal account that agrees with dominant liberal historicization), or to rival history, producing:
a novel that operates in terms of its own procedures and issues its own conclusions, not one that operates in terms of history and evaluates in conclusions that are checkable by history (as a child's work is checked by a schoolmistress) […] perhaps even going so far as to show up the mythic status of history.
Lurie as a professor is all too familiar with the self-serving hypocrisy of the country, in which intellectuals happily denounce one another. Like Merseult he is driven to transgress by the stress of society, and the lure of sensuality.


As mentioned above, the character of Lucy adds a dimension to Disgrace not present in Camus' work (though it is worth remarking that Merseult's dead parents are powerful if ambiguous off-stage presences in the novel: his mother retreating into religious inauthenticity, his father obscurely fascinated and repulsed by an execution). Lucy thinks at first she can separate herself from history. Her ideal of working the land, however, turns sour. (Interestingly, Boehmer points to recourse to rural land cultivation as a trait of the postcolonial settler as legitimises the settler's presence in that land, seeing it as a continuation of the old justification of colonialism as stimulating a dormant economy.) The end of her relationship leaves her disillusioned and vulnerable, as her gradually but inexorably altering relations with her neighbour act as a microcosm for the changing South African dynamic between white and black. Lurie feels the incongruity of "this sturdy young settler" his daughter (who presumably reacted against her parents' influence) as the offspring of "cityfolk, intellectuals". Economically, Lucy's success depends not on agricultural production but on luxury products and services: flowers and kennels. Even in this area, her success is fragile, depending on her smiling presence (as Merseult could have depended on weeping for acquittal) in the marketplace. However, by the novel's end she seems to have decided to dedicate herself to a kind of stoic, Tolstoyan philosophy of non-resistance. She refuses the chance to leave the country, seeing that option as a retreat into a role, that of the dispossessed white settler. Instead, she atones in secular fashion for the sins of the past. When Lurie protests that her remaining will be an invitation to another attack, she does not dispute it, but feels retreat will validate historically the actions of the attackers. The issue is complicated as she sees the issue not only in terms of white oppression of blacks but of male oppression of women, causing Lurie to speculate "are she and he on the same side?"


Despite this, father and daughter are very similar. Both are stubborn and like Merseult "do not act in terms of abstractions" – although Lucy, whose father is identified as a "self-deceiver" is more consistent in this. She apparently sees settler guilt (and religion) sceptically as part of a conservative defence mechanism (as Satre says to the colonial left-winger "your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oppressors"), and takes a Nietzschean view of ethics as a bourgeois code motivated only by preservation of the status quo. Both would like to exist according to a romantic ideal of individualism, though Lucy is not impeded by idealism; she loves nature, not nature poetry. Their growing together is threatened by the attack (after which Lucy's copy of Edwin Drood, we suspect a conciliatory gesture to her father – and notably a unfinished novel in which an older man comes between young lovers) disappears, yet both dedicate themselves to quasi-religious (and celibate) forms of atonement, Lucy, ironically, roles reversed, the parent figure by the novel's end, consecrating herself as a kind of nun "that the quota of violation in the world will be reduced", Lurie as a priest who dispenses with personal affects and ministers to dying and dead dogs "because there is no one else stupid enough." Disgrace is a public condition, so the path back to grace must be somehow legitimised, ritualised. When Lurie "touches his forehead to the floor" "with careful ceremony" for the Isaacs, he has not become religious but has recognised what he can do for others with ceremony. He has learnt it is necessary to contradict his earlier insistence that repentance belongs to "another universe of discourse", as he stated at his hearing, referring to Herbert Marcuse's 'One Dimensional Man', in which Marcuse insists grimly "the ritualised concept is made immune against contradiction" by society. Lurie learns that society demands collaboration in prescriptions of gesture and language. Merseult, for Camus the "only Christ we deserve", in refusing to make a display of repentance to the last, becomes a kind of secular martyr to this demand.


The notion of freedom is central to both texts. Camus is commonly labelled an existentialist, though this is debatable. For Camus, freedom is only possible through unwilled reconciliation with absurdity and death. Any reference to an ethical system is inauthentic, a religious impulse. Therefore freedom has nothing to do with morality. This opposes the traditional ethical notion that freedom is a willed imposition of an ethical code onto the self, the autonomous denial of passion. Satre's ethics are similar, he states that "from the moment [man] is thrown into the world he is responsible for everything he does"; the existentialist will not borrow a pre-existing ethics, but nonetheless will invent and impose an ethical basis for behaviour, as it affects others. Merseult acts immorally or anti-socially, he is condemned and finds a paradoxical liberation from freedom. Lurie seeks a similar liberation from freedom, though he is condemned to continue existing, both in himself and through his daughter. Lucy in accepting her 'marriage' is selecting bondage as the freest option open to her. If Merseult is deficient in social imagination, Lurie is unaware of his role in mediating his own consciousness to himself. Both gain in awareness through their experiences, though pay for this gain in accepting of a fate determined by socio-historical conditions which the individual can neither refuse nor transcend. Whether either character really fundamentally alters is debatable, Lurie may have decided that the poets' Romanticism has "not guided him well", but he when he decides to prepare himself for his new role as grandfather, his typical and typifying impulse is to "look again at Victor Hugo, poet of Grandfatherhood."


Camus' novel expresses the belief that social abstractions and ideologies do not take into account the present moment (in which his hero dwells) of happiness or equality, instead perpetually deferring to a future which will never come. Society is based on hypocritical, inauthentic displays of pretended emotion. By the time of Disgrace, the harvest of colonial oppression is ripe, and settlers have all the more reason to verse themselves in social ritual in the hope of escaping retribution. For Coetzee, the existential assertion of man's potentialities is buried under the pressure of the past, existence strives in vain for independence from the cult of history. Neither novel wants to establish a polemic blueprint for social change; instead we are presented with myth or discourse with which we can engage without over-emotion.




[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.175.

[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.13.

[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.13.

[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.69.

[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.42.

[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.48.

[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.33.

[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.63.

[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.63.

[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.14.

[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.20.

[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.21.

[1] Albert Camus, The Myth Of Sisyphus (London, Hamilton, 1955), p.14.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.1.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.7.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.1.

[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.79.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.1.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.1.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.2.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.69.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.219.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.219.

[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.54.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.53.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.52.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.56.

[1] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 1967), p.48.

[1] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 1967), p.30.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.158.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.156.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.158.

[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.100.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.3.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.90.

[1] Ellke Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford Uni. Press), p.13.

[1] Ellke Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford Uni. Press), p.170.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.95.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.95.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.95.

[1] Ellke Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford Uni. Press), p.188.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.60.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.1.

[1] Cyril Connelly, preface to The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.8.

[1] Cyril Connelly, preface to The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.9.

[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1961), p.120.

[1] David Atwell, J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley: Uni. Of California Press, 1993), p.13.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.112.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, interview, quoted in: David Atwell, J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley: Uni. Of California Press, 1993), p.14.

[1] Ellke Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford Uni. Press), p.215.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.61.

[1] (Lucy has other intriguing similarities with Tolstoy, her apparent view of the sexual instinct as a burden, her vegetarianism.  Her self-sacrificing nature also links her with certain of Dostoyesky’s female characters.  Coetzee has written critically on both these authors.)

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.159.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.112.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.188.

[1] Jean-Paul Satre, preface to The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 1967), p.20.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.148.  Here Lurie is referring to Bev, but, I would argue, considering his daughter.

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.146. 

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.173. 

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.58. 

[1] Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (London: Routledge, 1964), p.48.

[1] Albert Camus, interview, quoted in: Patrick McCarthy, Camus: The Stranger (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni. Press, 1988), p.52.

[1] Jean Paul Satre, Existentialism and Humanism (London: Methuen, 1948), p.34. 

[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.179.
[1] J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), p.218.