“Seeing the entire world as a foreign land”: the exilic intellectual in JM Coetzee's Disgrace

Abstract

My reading of JM. Coetzee’s Disgrace is informed by the deployment of the concept of exilic consciousness by postcolonial theorists, notably Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, and literary critic Julia Kristeva, to project an anti-utopian and antinomian vision of the universe that is very much at odds with conventional morality and ways of thinking about reality and identity. Through the author’s expressive use of irony and other related tropes and discursive protocols that inform the novel – notably Lurie’s stubborn display before the tribunal when he refuses to submit to a patently predetermined world view he perceives to be too “administered” (Said 2000: 184) – Coetzee’s text becomes a lens through which particular unstable identities are played out in the postcolonial condition. Coetzee does this by suffusing Disgrace with a vision of the exilic imagination that is mediated mainly by the conflicting and contradictory strains of language.