In Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee scrutinizes the nature of human desire, specifically looking at the relationships between power and sexual yearnings. Because Disgrace is partly about a fifty-two-year-old professor who loses his job after sleeping with a student, it’s impossible to ignore the power dynamics at play in the novel, as Professor David Lurie uses his elevated position to manipulate twenty-year-old Melanie into having sex with him. David is drawn to the idea of being in a position of power, and his relationship with Melanie enables him to experience this sense of authority. This thirst for power is present in all of his sexual relationships, as every person in the book that he sleeps with he also thinks is somehow inferior to him. In the end, though, he’s the one left jobless, emotionally unsupported, and widely disrespected, thereby proving not only that he was wrong to think of himself as more powerful than the women he sleeps with, but that approaching sexual or romantic relationships with such a selfish and objectifying attitude actually leads to loneliness and despair, not power.
David’s appetite for power in the context of sex is made apparent in the novel’s first chapter, when he visits a prostitute named Soraya. A regular client who visits every Thursday evening, David has developed a fondness for Soraya, about whom he knows very little. “Because he takes pleasure in her, because his pleasure is unfailing, an affection has grown up in him for her,” Coetzee writes. This suggests that David is interested first and foremost in “tak[ing] pleasure in” Soraya. Although this has led to a certain kind of “affection,” it is clearly superficial, stemming primarily from the notion that—because he pays to sleep with her—David need only sit back and enjoy what she has to offer, as if he’s entitled to her body. This then shows that he is comfortable in relationships that have uneven power dynamics.
Although David’s arrangement with Soraya hints that he doesn’t mind relational imbalances, their weekly appointments nonetheless reveal the complex nature of power when it comes to sex and romance. At first glance, David is in a position of dominance because he can apparently pay Soraya to do whatever he wants. What’s more, he’s free to be completely himself, whereas she must present herself in a way that will please him. “During their sessions he speaks to her with a certain freedom, even on occasion unburdens himself. She knows the facts of his life,” Coetzee notes. David feels at liberty to do and say whatever he wants to Soraya, since he’s the client—something that must feel quite empowering. However, by thinking only about himself and what will satisfy him, he fails to recognize the ways in which Soraya actually has power over him. After all, she’s providing him with a service that can be (and eventually is) revoked. Plus, she guards her private life in a way that makes her less vulnerable than him. “Of her life outside [the brothel] Soraya reveals nothing,” Coetzee explains. As such, readers may come to wonder who really holds the power in this relationship—is it David because he feels entitled to speak freely, or is it Soraya because she withholds information and thus remains separate from (and thereby uninfluenced by) him? Although Coetzee doesn’t answer this question definitively, the question itself indicates that sexual power dynamics are rarely black and white.
David’s thirst for power through relationships becomes even more pronounced when he pursues Melanie, a student in one of his classes. When he convinces her to come to his house for a drink, she doesn’t feel comfortable declining his offer because he’s an authority figure in her life. After giving her wine and dinner, he doesn’t hesitate to state what he wants, bluntly saying, “Stay. Spend the night with me.” That he says this so straightforwardly shows just how confident and powerful he feels in relation to Melanie. Furthermore, when she asks why she should stay, he says, “Because 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.” This graceless theory further reveals David’s misogynistic sense of entitlement, making it clear that he thinks he has some kind of right to Melanie’s body. Though she initially manages to leave before anything happens, several days later she ends up having sex with him. “Though she is passive throughout, he finds the act pleasurable,” Coetzee writes, a sentiment that once again suggests that David likes to feel powerful while his partners are “passive.”
Later, when David is forced to resign as a result of his coercive sexual behavior, his yearning to feel superior remains intact, as he eventually has sex with Bev Shaw, a woman he thinks of as frustratingly simple and unattractive. In doing so, he recaptures the sense of sexual superiority he so badly desires, though he also tells himself to stop thinking of Bev as “poor Bev Shaw.” “If she is poor, he is bankrupt,” Coetzee writes, ultimately reminding readers that David’s attempts to feel sexually powerful do nothing to change the fact that he is jobless and widely unpopular in his own community. In this way, then, the author shows readers the damning effects of pursuing relationships for the sole purpose of exerting power over another person—a pursuit that can only leave one spiritually and emotionally “bankrupt.”
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Desire and Power Quotes in Disgrace
Because he takes pleasure in her, because his pleasure is unfailing, an affection has grown up in him for her. To some degree, he believes, this affection is reciprocated. Affection may not be love, but it is at least its cousin.
He has toyed with the idea of asking her to see him in her own time. He would like to spend an evening with her, perhaps even a whole night. But not the morning after. He knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.
That is his temperament. His temperament is not going to change, he is too old for that. His temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body.
It surprises him that ninety minutes a week of a woman’s company are enough to make him happy, who used to think he needed a wife, a home, a marriage. His needs turn out to be quite light, after all, light and fleeting, like those of a butterfly. No emotion, or none but the deepest, the most unguessed-at: a ground bass of contentedness, like the hum of traffic that lulls the city-dweller to sleep, or like the silence of the night to countryfolk.
As she sips, he leans over and touches her cheek. ‘You’re very lovely,’ he says. ‘I’m going to invite you to do something reckless.’ He touches her again. ‘Stay. Spend the night with me.’
Across the rim of the cup she regards him steadily. ‘Why?’
‘Because you ought to.’
‘Why ought I to?’
'Why? Because 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.’
His hand still rests against her cheek. She does not withdraw, but does not yield either.
‘And what if I already share it?’ In her voice there is a hint of breathlessness. Exciting, always, to be courted: exciting, pleasurable.
‘Then you should share it more widely.’
Smooth words, as old as seduction itself. Yet at this moment he believes in them. She does not own herself. Beauty does not own itself.
He takes her back to his house. On the living-room floor, to the sound of rain pattering against the windows, he makes love to her. Her body is clear, simple, in its way perfect; though she is passive throughout, he finds the act pleasurable, so pleasurable that from its climax he tumbles into blank oblivion.
Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away.
Note that we are not asked to condemn this being with the mad heart, this being with whom there is some thing constitutionally wrong. On the contrary, we are invited to understand and sympathize. But there is a limit to sympathy. For though he lives among us, he is not one of us. He is exactly what he calls himself: a thing, that is, a monster. Finally, Byron will suggest, it will not be possible to love him, not in the deeper, more human sense of the word. He will be condemned to solitude.
‘My case rests on the rights of desire,’ he says. ‘On the god who makes even the small birds quiver.’
He sees himself in the girl’s flat, in her bedroom, with the rain pouring down outside and the heater in the corner giving off a smell of paraffin, kneeling over her, peeling off her clothes, while her arms flop like the arms of a dead person. I was a servant of Eros: that is what he wants to say, but does he have the effrontery? It was a god who acted through me. What vanity! Yet not a lie, not entirely. In the whole wretched business there was something generous that was doing its best to flower. If only he had known the time would be so short!
‘There was something so ignoble in the spectacle that I despaired. One can punish a dog, it seems to me, for an offence like chewing a slipper. A dog will accept the justice of that: a beating for a chewing. But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts.’
‘So males must be allowed to follow their instincts unchecked? Is that the moral?’
‘No, that is not the moral. What was ignoble about the Kenilworth spectacle was that the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature. It no longer needed to be beaten. It was ready to punish itself. At that point it would have been better to shoot it.’
She does not reply, and he does not press her, for the moment. But his thoughts go to the three intruders, the three invaders, men he will probably never lay eyes on again, yet forever part of his life now, and of his daughter’s. The men will watch the newspapers, listen to the gossip. They will read that they are being sought for robbery and assault and nothing else. It will dawn on them that over the body of the woman silence is being drawn like a blanket. Too ashamed, they will say to each other, too ashamed to tell, and they will chuckle luxuriously, recollecting their exploit. Is Lucy prepared to concede them that victory?
Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs. There must be other, more productive ways of giving oneself to the world, or to an idea of the world. One could for instance work longer hours at the clinic. […] Even sitting down more purposefully with the Byron libretto might, at a pinch, be construed as a service to mankind.
But there are other people to do these things—the animal welfare thing, the social rehabilitation thing, even the Byron thing. He saves the honour of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it. That is what he is becoming: stupid, daft, wrongheaded.
Let me not forget this day, he tells himself, lying beside her when they are spent. After the sweet young flesh of Melanie Isaacs, this is what I have come to. This is what I will have to get used to, this and even less than this.
‘It’s late,’ says Bev Shaw. ‘I must be going.’
He pushes the blanket aside and gets up, making no effort to hide himself. Let her gaze her fill on her Romeo, he thinks, on his bowed shoulders and skinny shanks. It is indeed late. […] At the door Bev presses herself against him a last time, rests her head on his chest. He lets her do it, as he has let her do everything she has felt a need to do. His thoughts go to Emma Bovary strutting before the mirror after her first big afternoon. I have a lover! I have a lover! sings Emma to herself. Well, let poor Bev Shaw go home and do some singing too. And let him stop calling her poor Bev Shaw. If she is poor, he is bankrupt.
One word more, then I am finished. It could have turned out differently, I believe, between the two of us, despite our ages. But there was something I failed to supply, something’—he hunts for the word—‘lyrical. I lack the lyrical. I manage love too well. Even when I burn I don’t sing, if you understand me. For which I am sorry. I am sorry for what I took your daughter through. You have a wonderful family. I apologize for the grief I have caused you and Mrs Isaacs. I ask for your pardon.
