The Furor over Rape in Disgrace

With the transition from the apartheid rule to democratic government in 1994 came the hope, both within and outside South Africa, that ‘the time when humanity will be restored across the face of society’ had come (Coetzee 1986: 35). Yet Coetzee's first post-apartheid novel, Disgrace (1999), set in South Africa, is remarkably bleak. As Derek Attridge has remarked, Disgrace's negative portrayal of the relations between communities, coming from an author widely read in South Africa and internationally, can be seen as a hindrance to, not a support of, the massive task of reconciliation and rebuilding that the country has undertaken. Touching on the central role of Coetzee's fiction in debates over the role of writers in contexts of extreme social injustice, Attridge remarks that ‘even readers whose view of the artist's responsibility is less tied to notions of instrumentalism and political efficacy than these questions imply – and I include myself among these – may find the bleak image of the “new South Africa” in this work hard to take, as I confess I do’ (Attridge 2000: 99–100).

Within the ANC, Disgrace was rejected outright as racist. The ANC, in its 1999 submission to the Human Rights Commission's investigation into racism in the media names Disgrace as a novel that exploits racist stereotypes.