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S Prasannarajan
A South African writer whose imagination was defined by the colour of her skin and the conspiracy of history wrote: ``The white writer has to make the decision whether to remain responsible to the dying white order -- and even as dissident, if he goes no further than that position, he remains negatively within the white order -- or to declare himself positively as answerable to the order struggling to be born. And to declare himself for the latter is only the beginning; as it is for whites in a less specialised position, only more so. He has to try to find a way to reconcile the irreconcilable within himself, establish his relation to the culture of a new kind of posited community, non-racial but conceived with and led by blacks''.
That was Nadine Gordimer, the white writer, perhaps the best known white writer of South Africa, defining her social responsibility. She is the stereotypical South African redeemer: I'm the chosen stylus in this land without justice, translating historical incorrectness into alanguage of social correctness. The privileged dissident, the white writer who raged against apartheid, won even the Nobel Prize for literature. For, the social obligation, or political correctness, is a prize-worthy literary quality according to the aesthetics of the Swedish Academy. And the subject of South Africa, a black-and-white narrative of guilt and hate, of resistance and repentance, is the perfect canvas for any sociologist who can also write novels, like Nadine Gordimer. Novels in which whiteness is more political than existential. Novels deformed by noble intentions. But there is one white South African novelist who refuses to be a social engineer, a novelist who refuses to offer choices of white-and-black clarity. J.M. Coetzee is more Dostoevskian than didactic.
``I write perversions of the truth. I choose the crooked road and take children into dark places. I follow the dance of the pen''. What the imagined Dostoevsky says in Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg is true of Coetzeehimself, perhaps the only difference being the dance of the South African's pen is more controlled and less elaborate than the dance of the Russian's pen, may be the greatest pen in the history of imagination. His Booker-winning novel Disgrace is a sculpted-to-perfection perversion of truth in New South Africa. To call it a political novel is an oversimplification, for Coetzee, a traveller in Dusklands, the political is only an adjective to the existential. He is the soulmeister in a cheerless place. In Disgrace, a novel of impulsive violations and slow-motion redemption, the truth is not absolute, as black and white, and the process of reconciliation is not that familiar passage of guilt and repentance. In the story of two sexual violations and the quiet, self-renewing progress of reconciliation, victimhood defies racial stereotypes, and recovery doesn't follow the historical script.
At the centre of the novel is a disgraced professor of literature, disgraced by an act of seduction. But David Lurie,an ageing child of Eros, refuses to repent, to confess in public: ``Repentance is neither here nor there. Repentance belongs to another world, to another universe of discourse.'' It belongs to the duskland of the south where his daughter Lucy lives alone on a smallholding. The father reaches there as a fugitive, as a seeker of solace and becomes a witness to another violation, another disgrace. Three black youths attack the farmstead and rape Lucy. It is a private matter in New South Africa where guilt and salvation are mere ``abstractions'', and Lucy, the victim, the knowing child of another victim, is prepared to pay. ``Why should I be allowed to live here without paying?'' Reconciliation is achieved by paying the price: Lucy accepts the bastard foetus, accepts the protection of the black neighbour whose complicity in the violation is quite apparent, accepts life gracefully despite the disgrace of circumstances; David achieves peace by nurturing dispossessed dogs, by having a sexual relationship with hisugly employer. Political liberation is a distant echo in this novel of suffering and salvation, of the perversions of truth and the grace of forgetting.
After all, for the writer of Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K, suffering in the desolate province of violated existence is nothing fictionally new. He has won the Booker again, a great moment for the honoured as well as the prize giver. For the best of the Booker is a short list of novels from the faraway lands of disgraced lives. The master of Cape Town is the chronicler of every man's disgrace.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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