“Done because we are too menny”: Ethics and Identity in J M Coetzee’s Disgrace

Abstract

This essay suggests that Coetzee extends ethical questions raised in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure – questions which have to do with the subject’s relatedness to other sentient beings within the context of a natural world indifferent to the individual’s plight or to contingent ethico-cultural values. As much as he comes to recognise their ephemerality and contingency, Lurie upholds Western values: the fact that his ethical paradigm is supervenient upon a cultural and historical moment does not in itself necessitate the view that this paradigm is without worth. Nevertheless, a growing awareness of the limits of his Western, anthropocentric value system alters Lurie’s responses to his fellowcreatures. Lurie recognises that he is part of a transtemporal “line of existences”, irrespective of his cultural engagement. A response which acknowledges the individual life as an instant in a larger sequence of existence demands an ethical understanding of the self as intrinsically related to other beings. In articulating this relatedness, Disgrace, like the opera that Lurie is composing, possibly succeeds in sounding “a single authentic note of immortal longing.” Yet, as in the case of the opera, it takes a “scholar” to recognise this note – and scholars themselves are the products of contingent and ephemeral cultures.