In Disgrace, Coetzee spotlights the benefits and subtleties of interpersonal support. After David is publicly shamed in Cape Town for sleeping with Melanie, he travels to his daughter’s farm to temporarily escape his troubles. Unlike his ex-wife Rosalind, who upon hearing about the scandal calls him and admonishes him for what he’s done, Lucy doesn’t force David to talk about what happened with Melanie. Instead of prying him with questions, she casually mentions what she’s heard about the situation, doing so in a way that doesn’t cast judgment on her father but does give him the opportunity to talk about his problems if he wants to. However, when it comes time for David to support Lucy in the aftermath of her rape, he fails to show her the same kind of light and caring approach, instead overwhelming her with his own concerns. In doing so, he ends up servicing his own anger about the situation instead of giving her the kind of support she needs. Coetzee thus suggests that sometimes the best way to help a person is to simply offer love and “refuge,” both of which can be presented in an unobtrusive, accepting manner.
Shortly after news of David’s affair with Melanie circulates, he’s forced to face the fact that he has very few supporters. He has dinner with his ex-wife Rosalind, who harshly comments on his predicament, saying, “Am I allowed to tell you how stupid it looks?” When David says, “No, you are not,” she plows on, saying, “I will anyway. Stupid, and ugly too.” As she continues, she chastises him for what he’s done, finally saying, “Don’t expect sympathy from me, David, and don’t expect sympathy from anyone else either.” By saying this, she emphasizes how much he is on his own when it comes to this particular matter, stressing the fact that nobody is willing to support him through this difficult period.
It is precisely because David can’t “expect sympathy from anyone” that Lucy’s easy acceptance of him on the farm is such a gift. In one of the first conversations they have upon his arrival, she asks how long he plans to stay, and he immediately feels the need to clarify that he won’t overstay his welcome. “I’d like to keep your friendship. Long visits don’t make for good friends,” he says, clearly thinking that—like Rosalind—she will be unwilling to support him emotionally. However, she goes on to hint that she knows about his troubles and that this won’t affect how she treats him. “What if we don’t call it a visit?” she says. “What if we call it refuge? Would you accept refuge on an indefinite basis?” Lucy not only shows her father that he’s welcome to stay for as long as he’d like, but that she’s willing to give him the support—the “refuge”—he needs in order to rebuild his life. What’s more, she communicates this without actually mentioning what took place at the university, thereby leaving it to her father to decide whether or not he wants to talk about his problems. With this, readers see Lucy’s gentle and accepting approach when it comes to trying to help her loved ones—an approach that makes it easier for David to process what has happened to him on his own time and in his own way.
In contrast to Lucy’s hands-off style of offering support, David finds himself incapable of giving his daughter the emotional space she needs after she is raped. Part of this is because he believes she’s avoiding the topic altogether, repressing it because of the memory’s painfulness. To be fair, this is a legitimate worry, one that any parent would most likely have. However, David comes on too strong whenever he tries to get her to move off the farm, frequently urging her to making a decision about what to do in the aftermath of her attack—a decision she isn’t ready to make. Finally, though, she breaks her silence one day when they’re driving in the car, suddenly telling him how terrible it was to see how much her rapists seemed to hate her. Spotting an opportunity to convince her to move away, David jumps in and insists that she should take a vacation in Holland, but she refuses, adding, “Thank you for the offer, but it won’t work. There is nothing you can suggest that I haven’t been through a hundred times myself.” He asks what she does plan to do, but she replies, “I don’t know. But whatever I decide I want to decide by myself, without being punished. There are things you just don’t understand.” In this way, she shows her father how important it is for her to process this on her own, without his interventions.
However, David is unwilling to let this happen. He ends up severely beating one of her rapists, a young boy Lucy has told him not to touch because of the boy’s mental disability and relationship with Petrus, who lives on her land. Through this action, David demonstrates his unwillingness to stay out of Lucy’s affairs, and though he’s only trying to help her, his actions drive them further apart, since Lucy asks him to stay elsewhere after his violent eruption. By comparing and contrasting David and Lucy’s methods of supporting one another, then, Coetzee indicates that sometimes a person’s mere presence is enough to emotionally sustain a loved one through a difficult period—a lesson David seemingly doesn’t learn until he moves out of Lucy’s house and slowly accepts that she has the right to process her trauma however she wants.
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Love and Support Quotes in Disgrace
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.
Don’t expect sympathy from me, David, and don’t expect sympathy from anyone else either. No sympathy, no mercy, not in this day and age. Everyone’s hand will be against you, and why not? Really, how could you?
‘Well, you’re welcome to stay.’
‘It’s nice of you to say so, my dear, but I’d like to keep your friendship. Long visits don’t make for good friends.’
‘What if we don’t call it a visit? What if we call it refuge? Would you accept refuge on an indefinite basis?’
‘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!
Spoken without irony, the words stay with him and will not go away. Bill Shaw believes that if he, Bill Shaw, had been hit over the head and set on fire, then he, David Lurie, would have driven to the hospital and sat waiting, without so much as a newspaper to read, to fetch him home. Bill Shaw believes that, because he and David Lurie once had a cup of tea together, David Lurie is his friend, and the two of them have obligations towards each other. Is Bill Shaw wrong or right? Has Bill Shaw, who was born in Hankey, not two hundred kilometres away, and works in a hardware shop, seen so little of the world that he does not know there are men who do not readily make friends, whose attitude toward friendships between men is corroded with scepticism? Modern English friend from Old English freond, from freon, to love. Does the drinking of tea seal a love-bond, in the eyes of Bill Shaw? Yet but for Bill and Bev Shaw, but for old Ettinger, but for bonds of some kind, where would he be now? On the ruined farm with the broken telephone amid the dead dogs.
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?
‘[…] Do you think what happened here was an exam: if you come through, you get a diploma and safe conduct into the future, or a sign to paint on the door-lintel that will make the plague pass you by? That is not how vengeance works, Lucy. Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets.’
‘Stop it, David! I don’t want to hear this talk of plagues and fires. I am not just trying to save my skin. If that is what you think, you miss the point entirely.’
‘Then help me. Is it some form of private salvation you are trying to work out? Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?’
‘No. You keep misreading me. Guilt and salvation are abstractions. I don’t act in terms of abstractions. Until you make an effort to see that, I can’t help you.’
‘[…] Petrus is not an innocent party, Petrus is with them.’
‘Don’t shout at me, David. This is my life. I am the one who has to live here. What happened to me is my business, mine alone, not yours, and if there is one right I have it is the right not to be put on trial like this, not to have to justify myself—not to you, not to anyone else. As for Petrus, he is not some hired labourer whom I can sack because in my opinion he is mixed up with the wrong people. That’s all gone, gone with the wind.’
‘I know what Lucy has been through. I was there.’
Wide-eyed she gazes back at him. ‘But you weren’t there, David. She told me. You weren’t.’
You weren’t there. You don’t know what happened. He is baffled. Where, according to Bev Shaw, according to Lucy, was he not? In the room where the intruders were committing their outrages? Do they think he does not know what rape is? Do they think he has not suffered with his daughter? What more could he have witnessed than he is capable of imagining? Or do they think that, where rape is concerned, no man can be where the woman is? Whatever the answer, he is outraged, outraged at being treated like an outsider.
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.
