Literature and the Production of Ambiguous Memory: Confession and Double Thoughts in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace

Abstract

One year after the massive, five-volume Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report appeared in 1998, we indisputably witness in Coetzee's Disgrace, by way of the account of professor David Lurie's downfall, the upheaval of a country in transition. The representation of this upheaval, however, drew considerable attention nationally and internationally and sparked a still ongoing debate on what Coetzee was trying to say about the life and times of post-apartheid South Africa. In this essay it is argued that an interpretation that allows itself to be guided too much by an allegorical meaning of Disgrace's mirror plot and that is too quick to accept the referentiality of a post-apartheid South Africa screaming for future images, ignores important if not essential plot lines and intertextual echoes. The powers of imagination, as masterfully deployed by J. M. Coetzee, make the role of literature in the production of cultural memory both monumentalising and ambiguous.