Disgrace

Lucy is David’s daughter. She is in her mid-twenties and lives alone on a farmhouse outside of Cape Town. The house was formerly a commune where Lucy lived with others. When they left, she stayed with her girlfriend, who eventually departed when they split up. By the time David arrives at Lucy’s house, she is alone. Her relationship with her father is much like her relationship with most people in her life: friendly, though not particularly close. Lucy allows her father to stay with her, though she does not press him for too much information about why he has been fired. His disgrace, she believes, is his own business. Likewise, she does not share information about her romantic life or personal problems. This lack of information shared between Lucy and David highlights the emotional distance between them. They are not estranged, nor are they antagonistic toward each other, but they are both burdened by the weight of their respective pasts. Lucy knows her father well enough to know his flaws. She accepts him but does not necessarily forgive him.

Though Lucy and David are often curt with one another, they do have a bond. Lucy has, in many ways, succeeded where David has not. She does work that David recognizes is important, and she has a level of independence that he desires. More importantly, Lucy has a capacity for empathy and understanding that David lacks. Whether she is running her own small business or communicating with Petrus, Lucy is a functioning member of society, and this contrasts with David’s isolation and his struggles to connect with others. She tries to impart her humanity to her father, encouraging him to work with Bev and the dogs, to run the stall at the farmers’ market, and to help Petrus with farmwork. David is a man who views the world through a transactional lens, and he cannot understand why she encourages him to volunteer his labor, since he doesn’t see how he will gain anything from it. Lucy strives to constantly better herself, and in doing so, she provides her father with a template for his own journey toward change.

While David is staying with Lucy, their home is invaded, and she is raped. Lucy withholds many of the details about the attack and the ensuing trauma from her father, much to his confusion. Lucy’s desire for privacy is informed by her father’s problematic relationship with women. She does not want to talk about sexual abuse with a man who has recently been fired from his job for sexual harassment. At first, David does not recognize the similarities between Lucy’s rape and his own actions. However, Lucy’s refusal to engage with him on the topic forces him to reconsider this, and as such, Lucy is responsible for the burgeoning guilt that provides him with the potential for change.

Even after the attack, Lucy retains her desire for independence. She is a practical woman who accepts that the world around her is changing and recognizes that her position in this world has also changed. As a result, Lucy renegotiates the terms of her freedom. She contemplates marrying Petrus as a way to keep her farm. In this way, she shows her father’s influence: Her rape, her pregnancy, and her potential marriage are denuded of their emotional implication, and she approaches the marriage in David’s transactional manner. Lucy is determined to create a better world amid the traumatic, changing circumstances. In this respect, her journey is an analogy for post-apartheid South Africa, showing the persistence of hope despite a history of violence and injustice.

Petrus is a Black South African, and in post-apartheid society, he has freedoms and opportunities that were previously denied to him. Earlier, he worked as a dog-man for Lucy: He helped her to corral the dogs in and out of the kennels. Now, however, he is a landowner and Lucy’s equal. Through his sudden growth in status, he represents the situation of many Black people in post-apartheid South who are suddenly able to pursue their ambitions. The legal oppression of the past no longer constrains men like Petrus, while white South Africans such as David struggle to deal with this sudden emergence of equality.

At times, David works alongside Petrus on the farm. They work together, but David resents the way in which Petrus seems to order him around. David’s resentment toward Petrus is representative of his broader struggles to adapt to social changes. David does not consider himself to be a racist, but—after spending a lifetime in a legally designated superior status—he resents being told what to do by a Black person. Lucy, a member of the younger generation, is much more open to accepting Petrus as her neighbor and an equal. Her pragmatism contrasts with David’s simmering resentment; through their attitudes toward Petrus, David and Lucy represent cross-generational responses to the post-apartheid world.

After the attack on David and Lucy, David insists that Petrus is somehow involved. David is never clear about why he believes Petrus was involved—he accuses Petrus of orchestrating the attack to seize Lucy’s land and of simply stepping aside and allowing the attack to happen. David’s accusations against Petrus are informed by his subconscious racism, though Petrus is a complex character who is deliberately not presented as innocent or pure. In the novel, Petrus provides an analogy for post-apartheid South Africa, but he is very much an individual with motivations of his own. His involvement in the attack is never clear, even when his association with Pollux (the youngest attacker) is revealed. For David, Petrus is demonstrably guilty by dint of association; for Lucy, the situation is more complex. She wants to continue her life on her farm and wants peace with her neighbor, Petrus. She believes that she must overlook the attack in order to bring this about. Lucy’s attitude toward Petrus gestures to a broader sense of guilt that she feels as a white woman who benefited from the apartheid order. The shadow of apartheid lays over the events in the novel, with Petrus emerging as its focal point. David’s resentment toward Petrus, Lucy’s willingness to forgive him, and Petrus’s ambition are all products of the end of the apartheid era.