Critique of White Hegemony in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.
S.
K. Prathap
Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee’s position as a writer is determined by the condition of his being a white writer belonging to South Africa, a country where apartheid had been the official governmental policy for almost half a century. His themes located in the South African context evince a conflict arising from his ironic awareness of having to write with a subjectivity shaped by the discourse of white hegemony. His fiction seeks to put the racial situation in perspective against the historical background with an impartial sympathy for general humanity. The subtly perceptible sense of guilt in the authorial voice about having been a member of the dominant race atones for it by foregrounding the ruptures in the power-equation engendered by resistance from the (erstwhile) oppressed. In the post-apartheid context, as depicted in his Booker Prize winning novel Disgrace (1999), this resistance comes from the new power structure. Coetzee transcends this aspect of his subjectivity by rendering his hegemonic white protagonist acutely aware of his powerlessness to effect change in the actual situations now under the sway of Black supremacy. Coetzee presents him as overcoming this crisis by redefining the resisting factors in terms intelligible to the hegemonic attitude. This new version of reality adapted to hegemony is one of romance, which can be denoted as an extravagant fiction, invention, or story, a wild or wanton exaggeration, or a picturesque falsehood (OED, Vol. VIII, 767). It is this undertone, which construes hegemony as ultimately unsustainable, that lends objectivity to the treatment of the racial problem in Coetzee’s fiction.
The concept of hegemony applied here comes from Antonio Gramsci who poses it in contrast to ‘rule’, which according to him is direct political control using force. Hegemony, on the contrary is, as defined by Raymond Williams, “the whole lived social process as practically organized by specific and dominant meanings, values and beliefs of a kind which can be abstracted as a “world-view” or “class outlook” “ (as qtd. in Barry 164). Gramsci identifies hegemony as a leadership that dominates not using force but through consent of the ruled (Said 7).
In Disgrace white hegemony survives through romanticizing the elements of resistance which it fails to contain in actual terms in the post-apartheid South Africa. In the new scenario the erstwhile oppressed races asserts their voice to the extent of silencing the whites. The country is passing through a massive restructuring of social relations. In the resultant turmoil all citizens technically enjoy freedom and the authority to create meaning. The non-whites are yet to master the language of assertiveness, while the hegemonic discourse to which the whites have been habituated for generations has lost the sanction of reality. Coetzee is thus free of his dilemma of being a member of the hegemonic race, and of having to write about the oppression of a people with the conscious burden of being instrumental in their suffering. Having cast away the shackles of hegemony his subjectivity is now free to present studies of South African reality.
For the mature whites who had lived the larger portions of their lives as belonging to the dominant race, throwing away the vestiges of hegemony may become enormously difficult. They are posed with the condition of having to either humble themselves into accepting the blacks as masters, or to continue in a fictional world of the lost hegemony. In Disgrace Coetzee presents with allegorical correspondence the perpetuation of the now unreal white hegemony in South Africa through the channels of romance. His foregrounding of the romantic aspect of this process is a clear statement of the redundancy of white hegemony in the post-apartheid context.
Among the other issues raised by the novel, the middle-aged white protagonist Prof David Lurie’s position with regard to two instances of forced sex, one involving himself and the other his daughter, most underline the illusory nature of white hegemony in contemporary South Africa. He is a romantic at heart, and this is endorsed by his academic fixation with romantic poetry. He is a divorcee leading a depraved sexual life. He forces one of his young students, Melanie Isaacs, whose being colored is hinted at a few times, into sex against her wish and protest. Hegemony asserts itself in his being unconcerned about the illegality or unethicality of his action. As a well-off white male, he might have enjoyed immunity from law against such actions during apartheid: But in the changed power situation reality impinges on him in the form of legal action based on the complaint of sexual harassment lodged by the student.
David Lurie holds on to his self-righteousness by refusing to accept the conscious will in the girl’s protest by deceiving himself into the notion that someone else is behind it because “she is too innocent for that” (39). Before the committee of enquiry he pleads guilty, but refuses to apologize being unable to discern the socio-political dimensions of his actions. For him it is entirely a private and natural event for one who temporarily became a “servant of Eros” (52). Underlying this fictional explanation is his hegemonic attitude, which unconsciously takes recourse to romance for continuance against the face of contradictory reality. As a woman in the committee puts it: “...he says, he is guilty; but when we try to get specificity, all of a sudden it is not abuse of a young woman he is confessing to, just an impulse he could not resist, with no mention of the pain he has caused, no mention of the long history of exploitation of which he is part.”
In the second instance of forced sex in Disgrace, David Lurie is at the receiving end, having to remain helpless while his daughter is raped by a gang of three blacks. The parallelism this incident draws with the earlier one with respect to Lurie’s position foregrounds his hegemonic double standards. The outcome here is the inverse of the former incident. While his daughter backs from complaining about the rape taking to mean the incident as one in which the erstwhile repressed class had been ‘collecting its debts’, Lurie universalizes it as an instance of public crime, divulging it of its South African contextual significance. Acknowledging the socio-political significance of the rape in the light of the studied inefficiency of the police to seize the criminals would mean an acceptance of the end of white hegemony, which Lurie unconsciously resists. His notion of the black identity smacks of a sense of the inferior and the disgusting ‘other’ as is evidenced by his attitude to Petrus, his daughter’s neighbour and business partner, whom he suspects of being a party to the crime. It gets precipitated also in his violent attack of one of the rapists, a minor boy, shouting “You filthy swine!”, a phrase the narrative foregrounds: “The word still rings in the air: Swine! ...Phrases that all his life he has avoided seem suddenly just and right: Teach him a lesson, Show him his place” (206). Just as he considers it natural for him to be a servant of Eros, he assumes it natural for the black to be criminal. In this false construction of the black identity lies the romance that preserves his hegemonic position.