Disgrace concerns itself with failures of empathy. When David forces himself on Melanie, he recognizes that his advances are “undesired,” but he continues anyway, exhibiting a troubling lack of compassion. In a similar but much more severe manner, the three men who rape Lucy do what they want to her without considering her humanity. These cases are quite different, since one is a blurrier instance of relational coercion and the other of sexual violence, but there are some uncomfortable overlaps between both situations. Indeed, while what David does to Melanie isn’t as physically aggressive as what the three rapists do to Lucy, he and his daughters’ abusers have something in common: they prioritize their own cravings over all else, even when this means subjugating another human being. Simply put, they act without empathy. By presenting this discomforting similarity, Coetzee gives readers a way of approaching the complex topic of sexual harassment and assault, ultimately suggesting that all such instances—whether physically violent or socially manipulative—are at their core failures of empathy.
After Melanie and David have sex for the first time, she avoids him. Instead of taking this as an indication that she doesn’t want to continue their relationship, David appears one afternoon at her apartment, and when she opens the door, he embraces her. Melanie tries to tell him that her cousin will be home soon—indicating that she feels she has to justify her desire not to have sex with him—but he ignores her protests. This moment shows how David has created an unequal relational environment in which he feels free to ignore Melanie’s wishes. Her comment about her cousin does nothing to stop him, as he brings her to the bedroom and undresses her. What’s most important to note in this scene is that David isn’t unaware of Melanie’s reservations, as he notices that she “avert[s] herself” from him. At the same time, Melanie “helps him” undress her, though she remains otherwise passive. “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core,” Coetzee writes. Readers see that, although it’s perhaps true that David hasn’t technically raped Melanie (and even this could be contested), he has subjected her to sexual activities that he knows she doesn’t “desire.” In this way, it becomes painfully obvious that the only thing he’s thinking about is what he wants, and he’s perfectly willing to make Melanie uncomfortable in order to satisfy himself.
After failing to empathize with Melanie, David is distraught when three men appear at his daughter Lucy’s farm and, after locking him in the bathroom, rape her. Of course, he is traumatized by his own experience, since the men steal his car and try to light him on fire, but what stays with him is the image of the intruders abusing his daughter. This image forces him to consider the lasting repercussions of sexual abuse in a way that he hasn’t previously contemplated. Indeed, when he got in trouble for harassing Melanie, he told a reporter that he didn’t “regret” what he did, saying, “I was enriched by the experience.” Judging by this statement, it’s apparent that David was still thinking only about himself even after he was publicly disciplined. Now, though, he finds it impossible to move beyond what has happened to Lucy, as he sees the profound impact of this traumatic experience on her life. Whenever he tries to talk to her or to Bev Shaw about what happened, though, he grows frustrated because they insist that he can’t possibly understand. “Do they think he does not know what rape is?” Coetzee writes. “Do they think he has not suffered with his daughter?” Of course, David hasn’t truly “suffered with his daughter,” since he’s not the one who was raped. However, the idea that he’s so hurt by the entire experience suggests that he’s finally starting to empathize with someone else. Whereas he appeared unwilling or unable to put himself in Melanie’s shoes, now he projects himself into Lucy’s experience and is horrified by what he finds.
As the novel goes on, Coetzee explores David’s gradual progression toward a more empathetic worldview. This manifests itself in his willingness to volunteer with Bev Shaw at the Animal Welfare League, where he helps her put unhealthy and unwanted pets out of their misery. At first glance, this might seem like a job for somebody who isn’t empathetic, since—as David thinks at one point—it requires a certain “hardness.” However, this isn’t necessarily the case, as David discovers when he first asks Bev if she “minds” having to end so many lives. “I do mind. I mind deeply,” she says. “I wouldn’t want someone doing it for me who didn’t mind.” By the end of the novel—in the aftermath of Lucy’s rape—David devotes himself to these helpless animals because he finally understands how callous and uncompassionate he has been. “He has learned by now, from [Bev], to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name: love,” Coetzee notes. Although David can’t change what he did to Melanie, he can learn to embrace empathy, which ultimately would have kept him from transgressing in the first place. In this sense, Coetzee intimates that if more people cultivated their capacities for empathy, there would most likely be fewer instances of violence in the world, though Coetzee characteristically applies complexity to David’s newfound empathy, since he is—after all—killing an animal. As such, the author implies that people ought to strive to be empathetic while also acknowledging that choosing to live compassionately might not always be an easy choice.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Violence and Empathy ThemeTracker
Violence and Empathy Quotes in Disgrace
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.
We are again going round in circles, Mr Chair. Yes, 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 this is part. That is why I say it is futile to go on debating with Professor Lurie. We must take his plea at face value and recommend accordingly.
The events of yesterday have shocked him to the depths. The trembling, the weakness are only the first and most superficial signs of that shock. He has a sense that, inside him, a vital organ has been bruised, abused—perhaps even his heart. For the first time he has a taste of what it will be like to be an old man, tired to the bone, without hopes, without desires, indifferent to the future.
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.’
‘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.
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.
‘I don’t trust him,’ he goes on. ‘He is shifty. He is like a jackal sniffing around, looking for mischief. In the old days we had a word for people like him. Deficient. Mentally deficient. Morally deficient. He should be in an institution.’
‘That is reckless talk, David. If you want to think like that, please keep it to yourself. Anyway, what you think of him is beside the point. He is here, he won’t disappear in a puff of smoke, he is a fact of life.’
