Examining the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in JM Coetzee’s Disgrace
By Sarah Ang
Alpine Fellowship 2020 – Academic Writing Prize Runner Up
Like many of JM Coetzee’s novels, Disgrace takes place in his native South Africa, a country that for many years was ruled under a system of racial segregation termed apartheid. Unlike Coetzee’s other novels, which never directly deal with the effects of apartheid, however; Disgrace confronts the issues post-apartheid South Africa faces head-on, most notably in its embedded critique of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a court-like restorative justice body that was created in an effort to right the wrongs of apartheid and mend the rift between a divided nation. This essay argues that Disgrace functions as an allegory for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, reflecting Coetzee’s views of its inherent limitations – the inability of the commission to ensure remorse was felt by the perpetrators; provide adequate justice for the oppressed; and achieve lasting reformation of the perpetrators.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the result of a compromise between the African National Congress and vocal anti-apartheid leaders, in an attempt to blaze a path leading to a “new South Africa” (Ogden, 2012). Witnesses who were identified as victims of human rights violations were invited to give statements about their experiences at public hearings. In these same hearings, perpetrators could publicly confess their guilt and atone for their actions in exchange for amnesty, should the panel of judges feel that the confessant had fully disclosed what had transpired. In “Narrative and Healing in the Hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Sandra Young explains that this offer of amnesty was ‘suggested as a means to arrive at the truth of apartheid atrocities, while enabling the victims of apartheid’s human rights abuses to benefit from public acknowledgment of the truth after years of harassment and denials.’ (Young, 2004). The central hope of the commission, then, was that letting the truth come to light would naturally bring about reconciliation between perpetrator and victim.
The problem with this process, however, was that it neglected an integral part of reconciliation – the perpetrator’s expression of remorse. It was impossible for the truth and reconciliation commission to ascertain true sincerity on the part of the perpetrator, and this was a fundamental flaw that impinged on its success in bridging the gap between the two parties, as how could the victim forgive if the perpetrator did not recognise there was a wrong to forgive in the first place? Coetzee illustrates this problem in David Lurie’s trial, which bears striking similarities with the public hearings organised by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The committee of inquiry includes members of different faculties and ethnicities, with its chairman Manas Mathabane and his secretary Aram Hakim; the professor Farodia Rassool from Social Sciences; Desmond Swarts, the Dean of engineering, and an unnamed female student from the Coalition against Discrimination. The members of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were similarly diverse, of differing religious, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Moreover, the function of the committee of inquiry is to ‘determine whether there are grounds for disciplinary measures’ (41), echoing the commission’s purpose of determining whether individuals who appeared before it should be prosecuted.
The ensuing proceedings bear resemblances to the public hearings as well. Perpetrators were encouraged to openly reveal the details of their crimes, so that they could avoid retribution. Similarly, Farodia Rassool asserts the need for David to explicitly allude to his crime, and offer an expression of contriteness:
…The question is whether Professor Lurie is clear in his own mind… Professor Lurie pleads guilty, but I ask myself, does he accept his guilt or is he simply going through the motions in the hope that the case will be buried under paper and forgotten? If he is simply going through the motions, I urge that we impose the severest penalty. (50-51)
With this paragraph, Coetzee evokes a key weakness of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Although its official mandate did not demand for sincerity on behalf of the perpetrator as a prerequisite to be granted amnesty, many of its victims expected their perpetrators to express genuine repentance for the barbarity of their actions. Farodia Rassool’s inversely proportionate equation of degree of acceptance of one’s guilt to degree of deserved punishment mirrors the general sentiments of those who chaired the trial. Yet this, as Coetzee shows through David, is problematic – while David has undoubtedly done something wrong by sleeping with his student, he can only acknowledge his guilt in a legal sense, and is unable to confess a personal sense of guilt:
…I have said the words for you, now you want more, you want me to demonstrate their sincerity. That is preposterous. That is beyond the scope of the law. (55)
As Rebecca Saunders puts it, Dr Rassool wants ‘a confession, a turning inside out of the accused, an exposure of the inner, hidden parts of the soul’ (Saunders, 2005). The issue with this is that confession is a concept firmly rooted in the private sphere, that as David himself voices, is ‘beyond the scope of the law’, which is inherently a public instrument. In Antony Holiday’s critique of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he argues that its Christian and judicial elements were highly contradictory. (Holiday, 1998) Confession and contrition, with their religious associations, took place between a sinner and a priest in the confession booth, or between a sinner and God in prayer, and to conflate this with a public trial is to inevitably invite disastrous results. Remorse cannot be forced into being but must emerge organically from the bottom of one’s heart, and if a public confession is demanded, there can be no guarantee that this is the case.
Certainly, Coetzee reveals that this is not the case for David. Dr Rassool is correct in her assessment that his acceptance of guilt does not reflect his ‘sincere feelings’ (54). In his defence to the committee, David says ‘Words passed between us, and at that moment something happened which, not being a poet, I will not try to describe. Suffice it to say that Eros entered. After that I was not the same.’ (52) It is ironic that Lurie is a professor of Communications, yet he claims to be unable to ‘describe’ the impulse that led to his crime and avoids any real details of his thought process. His attempts to communicate are so fraught with hedging and vagaries that they only obfuscate, and confuddle the committee. His attribution of his crime to Eros, the Greek god of love – ‘I became a servant of Eros’ (52) can be read as an attempt to transfer the guilt to an external entity, and to deflect the blame away from himself. This is emphasized in how he later compares himself to a golden retriever which was beaten repeatedly for its sexual impulses, to the point that it would ‘chase around the garden with its ears flat and its tail between its legs, whining, trying to hide’ at the ‘smell of a bitch’ (90). David evidently sees himself in a similar light, as a man ‘punished for following [his] instincts’ (90). His attempt to reframe the situation he has wrought, casting himself as a victim rather than Melanie, clearly shows that he does not harbour any sincere sense of wrongdoing.
I would go even further to argue that David’s behaviour is steeped in selfishness. There is no account of any concern on his part for how Melanie is coping with her own disgrace of being publicly known as his victim, only a consideration that she could not have been the one to initiate the accusation. To David, Melanie is merely a vehicle to satisfy his own desires – she exists only in relation to him. Even from the beginning of their interactions, he tells her ‘a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it’ (16) – the implication being, of course, that she should share it with him. Using the phrase ‘into the world’ not only implies he associates himself with the world in an almost arrogant fashion, but also suggests David’s world only revolves around himself. Coetzee uses the narrative mode of the novel to emphasize this – while it is written in the third person, it is focalised through David and frequently gives us access to his innermost thoughts and emotions, but never that of other characters - the most we see is David imposing his ideas of what other characters might be thinking onto them, as in: ‘In her voice there is a hint of breathlessness. Exciting, always, to be courted: exciting, pleasurable’. (16) It is debatable whether Melanie is actually responding excitedly, or if this is what David wants to believe. In illustrating David’s lack of sincerity, Coetzee calls into question the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s assumption that remorse would accompany public avowals of wrongdoing.
The failure of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to ascertain and ensure true remorse led to its failure to achieve justice. Not only was it unable to bring about restorative justice, or the system of criminal justice which focuses on the rehabilitation of offenders through reconciliation with victims and the community at large, (Oxford English Dictionary, consulted 2020); as I have explained earlier, it was also unable to bring about retributive justice, or criminal justice based on the punishment of offenders. (Oxford English Dictionary, consulted 2020). Many perpetrators escaped punishment by simply ‘stonily, even insouciantly, recounted acts of unfathomable barbarity, counting on this ‘truth’ to pay their debt, purchase amnesty and settle the demands of responsibility.’ Due to these instances, South Africans regarded the TRC’s ‘truth for amnesty’ deal as ‘essentially exchanging justice for truth, or as merely cancelling debts rather than exacting payment for them’. (Saunders, 2005) This is echoed in how Lucy’s rapists are never punished for their crime, but left free to ‘roam the area’ (199), contrary to David’s wishes for them to ‘be caught and brought before the law and punished’ (119).
Rather, it is arguable that the victims suffered most from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In voicing their suffering, they are forced to relive the moment of their distress twice, potentially re-traumatising them and inhibiting their recovery process. Saunders argues that this baring of one’s trauma would likely feel like a second ‘violation’, especially when unaccompanied by any tangible ‘rectification of the social or economic circumstances it exposed’. Moreover, victims were often pressured into forgiving their oppressors, even if they were not initially willing to do so, made to ‘sacrifice one’s personal healing for the nation’s’ (Saunders, 2005). Rosemary Nagy suggests that the burden of national reconciliation hence fell squarely on the victim’s shoulders:
‘National reconciliation was indeed premised upon moral transformation, but of victims: as forgiving rather than angry, and generous rather than demanding. The pressure to forgive misplaced the burden of reconciliation on victims rather than on those who were responsible for apartheid’ (Nagy, 2004).
I would add to this analysis by arguing that this misplacement of the burden on the victim also deprived them of a basic human right – freedom of choice. In artificially engineering a ‘spectacle’ (66) of forced confession and forgiveness, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission distorted the very conception of justice it claimed to uphold.
Coetzee uses the character of Lucy to reflect this pressure to forgive, or at least to accept. Lucy rationalises her decision to refrain from laying charges against her rapists and to stay on the farm as follows:
'But isn't there another way of looking at it, David? What if. . . what if that is the
price one has to pay for staying on…They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves.' (158)
Here, Coetzee shows us that Lucy’s decision is intertwined with her knowledge of apartheid. She believes that as a white woman, they hold her responsible for the violations they have endured at the hands of her ilk. In an almost Christ-like way, she is taking on the sins of her entire country and seeking to make reparations by subjugating herself, exemplifying sacrifice of personal healing for South Africa’s. Lucy thus parallels the victims in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, who absorb the guilt of the oppressor by taking on the burden of forgiveness. Although Lucy seemingly comes to this decision of her own volition, her hand is forced by pragmatism. Accepting that the crime has occurred and that there is nothing she can do about it, and accepting a marriage of convenience with Petrus, is the ‘price’ she has to pay to continue sharing the land. Ogden argues that this is the view Coetzee would have us support – ‘Coetzee sees acquiescent reconciliation as a sad but more appropriate and realistic near future for a nation still climbing out of segregation’ (Ogden, 2012); I would disagree – there is no reason to infer that Coetzee shows Lucy’s method of dealing with wrong is supposedly the correct way, and the prospect of reconciliation consisting of one party accepting all forms of humiliation without demanding justice seems to me misguided. Instead, I would counter-propose that Coetzee uses Lucy’s example to indicate the pressures that victims in Truth and Reconciliation Commission public hearings face, to point out yet another weakness.
The third glaring flaw of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was its inability to enact transformation, or achieve tangible change, both on a national level and on an individual level. The reason for the latter is inextricably linked with remorse: as perpetrators lacked remorse, they also lacked the incentive to change their mindsets and behaviour.
At first glance, David does seem to undergo some form of transformation, which can be taken to be Coetzee’s way of making allowances for the merits of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in orchestrating some degree of change within the guilty.
Lucy’s brutal rape by the three invaders compels him to conduct a rigorous self-evaluation of his treatment towards women:
…he can, if he concentrates, if he loses himself, be there, be the men, inhabit them, fill them with the ghost of himself. The question is, does he have it in him to be the woman? (160)
He sees an uncanny parallel between himself and Lucy’s rapists, and this shakes him to the core. The question of whether David has it in him ‘to be the woman’, that is, to have empathy for them, or by extension, to have compassion for beings other than himself, is one that he slowly attempts to answer. He no longer looks down on ‘poor’ (150) Bev Shaw as a ‘well-intentioned’ (73) but misguided do-gooder, but gains a newfound respect for her by watching how she works with the dogs. Rather than being repulsed by her ‘dumpy’ (72) appearance, he finds his attention drawn to the delicacy with which she handles the dogs and her calm confidence even in the face of death. His affair with Bev is unlike any of the ones he has engaged in before in its sheer passiveness:
…Of their congress he can at least say that he does his duty. Without passion but without distaste either. So that in the end Bev Shaw can feel pleased with herself. All she intended has been accomplished. He, David Lurie, has been succoured, as a man is succoured by a woman; her friend Lucy Lurie has been helped with a difficult visit. (150)
Here, David puts himself in Bev’s position and imagines her own happiness, arguably prizing her pleasure over his own. David’s brief affair with Bev can be interpreted as a kind of atonement for his sins – he is finally learning to consider others before himself. Perhaps, in placing himself in a similarly passive role, he is trying to make amends for what he did to Melanie.
David’s most notable transformation, however, comes in his relation to his viewing of animals. Earlier in the novel, David tells Lucy that ‘we are of a different order of creation from the animals’ (74) reflecting his belief that he should not care for animals because they have no bearing on his personal life. After the rape, however, David takes on the role of ‘dog-man’ (146):
…He is not prepared to inflict such dishonour upon them. So on Sunday evenings he brings the bags to the farm in the back of Lucy's kombi, parks them overnight, and on Monday mornings drives them to the hospital grounds. There he himself loads them, one at a time, on to the feeder trolley, cranks the mechanism that hauls the trolley through the steel gate into the flames, pulls the lever to empty it of its contents, and cranks it back, while the workmen whose job this normally is stand by and watch. (144)
Here, David displays a keen sensitivity to what is deemed the most lowly of creatures – dogs who are not just unwanted and technically valueless but also dead. Marianne DeKoven encapsulates this well:
…He is acting on his belief that there is another chance; that we should all, all of us animals, be escorted properly out of the life that has ended. He will take responsibility for those beings with souls whom no one else will take responsibility for. (DeKoven, 2009)
David has always shunned responsibility in his affairs with women, particularly in the case of Melanie – he is preoccupied primarily with himself. This taking on responsibility for beings lesser than himself can thus be seen as a turning over of a new leaf, a gesture of atonement for the wrongs he has committed.
Yet it must be noted that Coetzee leaves David’s transformation ambiguous and open-ended. In David’s act of apologising to Melanie’s mother and sister, Desiree, by ‘get[ting] to his knees and touch[ing] his forehead to the floor’, he experiences a ‘current of desire’ upon meeting Desiree’s eyes. He continues to be obsessed with Melanie even after this act, going to see a play she is acting in. Although he professes to change his mindset about women, acknowledging that he had been ‘enriched’ by ‘each of’ the women he had slept with, he promptly proceeds to use a streetwalker, a ‘tall girl in a minute black leather skirt’ (194) for his sexual gratification on the same night. As Nagy points out, his musing of ‘So this is all it takes!’ (194) reminds the reader of the opening lines of the novel – ‘he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well’ (1) (Nagy, 2004). The sentence he says to the streetwalker – ‘I’m taking you back to where I found you’ – perhaps best applies to David himself; the reader is taken back to where they first found David, only to discover he remains unchanged.
Even David’s care for the dead dogs can be seen as intrinsically self-motivated. In the ending of the novel, he ‘giv[es] up’ (220) a crippled dog which he has come to regard as his companion, ‘bearing him in his arms like a lamb’ (220) to the operating room for the fatal kiss of death. The comparison of the dog to a lamb invites connotations of sacrifice, bringing to mind Christ’s selfless death on the cross for the sins of mankind. Some critics, like Rachel McCoppin, have argued that this is hence a selfless act – David is sacrificing his attachment to the dog for its greater good. It must be remembered, however, that David is still giving up the dog to die, and one must also consider that the plight of this dog does not seem so terrible after all. It can still walk, albeit with difficulty, and many dogs have survived with more grievous injuries; one viable alternative for its survival would be for David to take it home and look after it. The comparison of the dog to a lamb hence invites ‘scapegoating’ connotations instead, as David mentions earlier in the novel – allowing the dog to die is a method for David to symbolically relieve himself of his own disgrace. The impression that the dog’s life is disgraceful, we must recall, is David’s own, brought to us by the narrative focalisation of the novel. Using the dog as a proxy for himself is still rooted in his self-interest, and indicative that he has not really become more selfless after all.
I would argue that further to this, Coetzee also uses the ending as a metaphor for the reaction of the victim to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – just as David surrenders the dog, they are forced to ‘give up’ their sense of injustice and accept that their perpetrators will never be punished for their barbarities. This is perhaps the most damning indictment of the commission that Coetzee suggests - that it only results in reluctant acceptance of the impossibility of real justice.
Disgrace is a complex novel that is difficult to decipher, and troubling in its implications. With regards to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it leaves us with no easy conclusions to swallow, inviting an incriminating evaluation of a system that opposes the very principles its name proclaims to protect. In doing so, it confirms its place as a work of great literature, for after all, is art not meant to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable?
Bibliography
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