Coetzee’s Postmodern Bodies: Disgrace between Human and Animal Bodies

Abstract

This paper looks at the intersection between human and animal bodies in J. M. Coetzee's postapartheid novel Disgrace (1999). My argument is that Coetzee employs postmodern notions about the overlap between human and non-human bodies and their proximity in his fiction. Although Coetzee problematizes our conception of the body in most of his other works, it is in Disgrace that we have a unique combination of human and animal bodies and a juxtaposition of each body against the other. Coetzee, I contend, writes within the rubrics of postmodern posthumanism whereby his works interrogate questions of life, death, embodiment, otherness, and the body. While it is characteristic of postmodernism to break down distinctions and to argue the irrelevance of borders, Coetzee applies this logic to his treatment of humans and animals and toward significant ethical and political ends. Through multiple encounters with animals, David Lurie in Disgrace is forced to reexamine the boundaries between animal and human life and, thus, to react differently to suffering and other forms of life around him.