Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (62 page)

David Lurie is also stripped of all power. But in his case, stripping has the added connotation of old age’s rebuke and punishment that it had for Oedipus at Colonus, which is again why this novel is so central to my purposes in this book. Many are the passages in which Coetzee writes this chastened man’s sense of an impoverished future. Sometimes they are quite down-to-earth in their material particulars: “He sees himself, white-haired, stooped, shuffling to the corner shop to buy his half-litre of milk and half-loaf of bread; he sees himself sitting blankly at a desk in a room full of yellowing papers, waiting for the afternoon to peter out so that he can cook his evening meal and go to bed.” But David does not settle into the sedentary model he has fantasized. The story of privilege and power moves beyond the projected image of a stooped white-haired man with his meager milk and bread and papers, beyond even the racial and political turmoil of the changing South Africa, and opens out onto still broader themes.

“Like a dog,” Lucy said. Like the goat, we might add. Indeed, like the two sheep, the black-faced Persians, which David “bonds” with before they are slaughtered for Petrus’s party, causing David to reflect: “Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry.” Here is the routine slaughter of the innocent, a slaughter so hardwired into cultural habit as to be invisible. In a later novel,
Elizabeth Costello
, Coetzee developed a full-scale animal rights thesis, ultimately comparing the slaughter of animals to the slaughter of the Jews. He does not go that far in
Disgrace
, but that is the direction he points toward: the greatest power abuse in history, carried out on animals every single day. Is there any wonder that he invokes the German term
Lösung
to signify the fate of the animals:
Lösung
, solution,
Endlösung
, Final Solution. Do we not, each of us as we age, face a Final Solution?

Hence the fifty-two-year-old white man rebuked for sexual and racial privilege is obliged to drain the cup, and in doing so, he begins to recognize his place in a larger scene of expiation and sacrifice and death. For that is what Bev Shaw deals with all the time: animals who have come to the end of their tether; animals whose next step is to be put away. David discovers that his postacademic work is to consist of assisting in the deaths of these unwanted animals, to carry their dead bodies to the incinerator so that they can be destroyed with at least some modicum of charity. Why does he do this, he asks himself, especially since the canine bodies he carries are already dead; what, he asks, do dogs know of honor and dishonor anyway? The answer he reaches—it is an answer that requires the entire novel, the upbraiding, sacking, and burning, to reach—is an answer whose moral if not grammatical tense is the perfective, “signifying an action carried through to its conclusion”:

The quasi-musical reach of this sparse but echoing novel reminds us over and over that David’s own fate as aging male is mirrored in that of the animals he now cares for. It is the generic shame of mortality, the inescapable disgrace of dying, the mystery of how we leave living, that is being addressed. It is a powerful—indeed, earthshaking—issue: the curse that life itself puts us under; no Greek oracle needed. A day comes when you are “too menny,” when you can no longer take care of yourself, when you start dying. In this regard, David’s trajectory in the novel is no less than a Pilgrim’s Progress, an ever-widening sense of the new territory he has entered, the new vistas he perceives, the new responsibilities he acquires. Coetzee takes our existential core issue—growing old—and imparts a staggeringly rich payload to it, forcing us (much as it forces David) to recognize a broader pattern of grace and disgrace, of stewardship and entropy, of desire and generosity, than we customarily assign to this theme.
Disgrace
acquires considerable pathos in this respect because David Lurie is such an improbable candidate for such a lesson: ironic, sophisticated, keen, discerning, unillusioned, unflinching, without puffery, he exerts what we’d have to call a critical gaze on all that befalls him. Much of the book’s appeal derives from his intelligent good company, no matter how dubious some of his moves may be ethically speaking. Hence this man’s evolution is a gripping experience for readers.

His fate becomes entwined with Bev Shaw and her activities. He makes love to this homely woman almost as a form of penance, as a recognition that his gallivanting days are over, but we also feel that whatever this man and woman do together in bed is stamped as much by kindness as it is by desire. That would be one of the lessons life teaches the old. The still-deeper lesson, however, recalls Lucy’s willingness to be brought back to nothing, to be stripped of all implements of power and privilege; “Like a dog,” she and her father both said. So we close with dogs. David the dog-man assists Bev in helping unwanted, superfluous, helpless dogs die. He holds them and caresses them and brushes back the fur “so that the needle can find the vein,” and he supports them when their legs buckle and their souls exit, following which he packs them into bags and later wheels the bag into the flames, to “see that it is burnt, burnt up.” Their canine lives have come and gone full circle. It has required the professor’s help. The disgrace of dying shades into the grace of caring. Coetzee closes his novel by referencing one particular dog of which David is especially fond, an injured animal with a withered left hindquarter that loves him unconditionally, that, David is sure, would die for him. And so, one fine day, he does. He and Bev are completing their death rounds, their
Lösung
, for the day, and she asks if there are any left. The book’s last lines go like this:

What is being given up? An injured dog? A right to life? A right to the kind of life one has enjoyed earlier and taken for granted? Male sexual privilege? White racial privilege? The privileges of our species? Giving up is all too easily construed as defeat, as humiliation (which is how David saw it with Lucy), as penance; but we can also see it as the reversal, perhaps the transcendence, of desire itself. Giving as the alternative to taking. At the end of
Disgrace
, “giving up” is the recognition that at a certain time in life appetite must be renounced, wanting must yield to something larger, giving up becomes giving. Love endures, but it must change its course, its nature. Coetzee has charted, without the least bombast or sentimentality or sermonizing, the route from eros to caritas. We are familiar with such a trajectory when it comes to religious discourse. Without any preaching or pretensions to being “wisdom literature,” this novel, luminous at the close, helps us see this spiritual journey as inseparable from the temporal voyage that stamps every human life.

A final word about
Disgrace:
David Lurie may seem a most unprepossessing figure to close my study of growing old: aloof, ironic, even partially unregenerate at the end, more than a little tepid in the realm of human feeling. His fate has none of the heartbreak of Shakespeare’s Lear or Bernlef’s Maarten, nor does it have the rich sentience of Racine’s Phèdre or Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay. Yet Coetzee succeeds in making this ordinary man’s life emblematic, prismatic, as it moves into the war zone that we call old age. He is a man of privilege—as we all are in our salad days—and he will find out that these privileges can be recalled. That life’s severe order requires their removal. He faces the
Endlösung
, the Final Solution, the final disgrace that all living creatures face: growing old, dying. In his dance with time, we see a replay of all our rubrics: undone fathers, exiting the stage, postsexual existence, final harvest, the good fight. He moves—grudgingly, unheroically—into a kind of generosity that I am prepared to label “enduring love.” Brought permanently low, yet still breathing and going through his paces, David Lurie evinces, I believe, a bare but real wisdom about the responsibilities that we have toward our loved ones, our conflicted culture, and our vexed planet. His trajectory from noon to night encompasses both the coming of dark and the making of light.

In calling my conclusion “Commencement,” I am of course alluding to the established conceit that marks the close of the American college experience: young people complete their formal education, but instead of calling this closure event the end, we regard it as a beginning. Professors and administrators reliably and predictably hold forth on this perhaps clichéd topic each year in front of an audience of exhausted seniors (they’ve been partying for days now) and their no-less-fatigued families, who are waiting for the final act to be (at last) over. It is a familiar ritual. What is commencing is their postbaccalaureate life, the so-called real life that awaits them after their schooling is over. It does not seem far-fetched to say that they are approaching ever more closely the noontime of their lives, even if graduate school and professional apprenticeships await them.

What never fails to stun me during these Commencement rituals is the light they shed on the two central life phases of this book: growing up and growing old. We see the young at a liminal stage of their careers. We also see the old. I am thinking especially of one of the most revered customs of Commencement at my university (and at many others): the march of the alumni classes. In Providence, Rhode Island, this is a festive and highly symbolic tradition. The mayor of the city solemnly makes his way up College Hill in order to meet, greet, and sanction the university parade that is about to begin, all to the tune of marching bands from all over the state. It has a medieval feel to it, for we see the key figures of political and intellectual culture arrayed in their various robes and gowns, celebrating a moment of high significance. The parade begins with the marching of the oldest alumni down the Hill, followed by each successive class of alums and their families, culminating with the graduating seniors, by far the youngest participants in the procession.

I look at this procession, and I see more than I want to. In witnessing the march of the very old—often in their eighties, sometimes even their nineties—moving successively to men and women slightly less old, then middle-aged, then younger, then much younger, and finally the seniors themselves, I feel that I am watching a biological countdown in reverse. Time itself is cargoed here in a stunningly visual, staggered fashion, for this succession of marching bodies (some of them with crutches, some in wheelchairs, all the way down to the youngest ones, who stride proudly, even if some of them lurch for other reasons) reads inevitably like a blueprint on aging, on entropy. Death stalks here. But memory has its part to play as well. I am invariably reminded of my own college graduation in 1962, when this parade seemed almost surreal to me, given how ancient its participants seemed, how eternally young my peers and I felt. In successive years, as professor, I have been a spectator at the parade, always alert to the look of the alumni class my age, always curious to note whether they appear older or younger than (I fantasized) I look. Each year, my own class moves ever closer to the front of the line, because we are rapidly becoming the true oldsters of the party.

What is going on in this ritual? I have described the ocular effect of the procession: we see bodies moving from age to youth, written on by time. Of course, each age group has its own spread, some seeming sprightly, others more worn, but none is unstamped by their specific place in the continuum. Why do these old people march? Why are they at college reunions? Because, at some profound level of psyche and desire, they are seeking to recapture something of their own youth, of the glorious time when they too were the graduating seniors, the stars of the show. Innocence and experience. Life itself has intervened—they are five years out, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, fifty, all the way up to seventy years out—with its lessons of experience, and they are here, I believe, to salute and revisit innocence, their own innocence, their own distant past. They are trying to recall, maybe to relive, what was perhaps best in their lives. College reunions are saturated with desire, cued to the project of a magic retrieval of the past, not all that different from what Proust’s Marcel found in his tea-drenched madeleine. I may see them as old, marked by time; but their own sights are elsewhere entirely.

The graduation ceremonies close with the handing out of diplomas, conducted by each department of the university, and there too I experience a strange kind of double vision. I finally meet the parents of seniors whom I have taught. It is something I look forward to; it gives me a chance to see the seniors in a more personal and familial perspective, as I say good-bye to them after four years at Brown, as they head out into the world. A part of their growing up has happened. But the double vision is this: I see them in time, as if I were fast-forwarding; I look at their mothers and fathers and see what they are going to look like in twenty-five or thirty years. It is not always a comfortable perception, because it confers a kind of specificity, even fatality, on faces and bodies that seemed open and free during their tenure as undergraduates. Needless to say, with a little bit of effort, I also make the imaginative, perceptual trip backward, seeing what mother and father might/must have looked like at the age of twenty. Often enough, grandparents are in the picture as well—they’re the ones closer to my age—and they enable me to go still further, yielding something of a triptych in time.