I am a minor character who doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through… I am not minor. You behave as if everything I do is part of the story of your life. You get this sense during Lucy’s outburst, when she insists on keeping the baby: ‘I can’t run my life according to whether or not you like what I do. So while it’s great that he starts to sympathize more with animals and women, when it comes to women, he’s still relating them back to him and thus relegating them to the background. In fact, Lurie suggests that human beings are of ‘higher order’ – though, of course, he doesn’t behave accordingly, succumbing to his desires and treating women as though they aren’t part of that order. While Coetzee parallels animals and humans throughout, I don’t think he ever equates them. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry’ (123). While Lurie is grateful, I found this sense of him using (and discarding?) women problematic because it made me think of an earlier passage describing sheep: ‘Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness’ (192). There’s another passage, near the end when he thinks about all the women he has known, that supports this: ‘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. On a separate note, I was particularly intrigued by the notion of Lurie using women that Jae brought up. It was comprehensive and you did a great job of organizing all the different elements in the novel in a very coherent way. I would also have liked to hear your thoughts on why this work of his won the Booker Prize.Įmily – I thought your presentation was great. A lingering question I had – and I know it’s something you probably can’t answer unless you’ve somehow read all his works – was how ‘Disgrace’ fit into his body of works that included, as you mentioned, books that dealt with South African politics and animal rights. I also like that you showed us those two video clips – I found it extremely effective. I think you uncovered some really interesting things about Coetzee – his aversion to giving speeches and ‘writer-ly’ things (readings and talks), his views on the ‘white writer voice’ and his attempt to disrupt comparisons of him and his characters. Rex – I really enjoyed your presentation.
0 kommentar(er)
