Towards an Ethics of Sensation in J.M Coetzee's 'Disgrace'

Abstract

The allure, power and singularity of literature lie in its ability to inhabit the lives of others. By dwelling within and through the interior life-worlds of beings, literature reveals a deep connectedness between ideas and emotions, thoughts and feelings, concepts and sensations. It gives the hidden, invisible world of sensation a public space for expression and translation. Narrative prose has the capacity to convert sensations into ideas, ideas into stories, and stories into memories. If the stories are good enough and told well enough, they are returned to the invisible realm of the sensory and the felt. Memory is fundamental to this process, and so is resistance, since it introduces a necessary point of limit, or of no return, through which sensations withstand, battle and convert into figures of speech and writing. Sensation gives writing and story-telling passion, fire, form and body: without it there would be no loving or longing, no anger or violence, no hope or desire. J.M. Coetzee's literature carries "a certain spirit of resistance" that is "linked to his feelings about freedom" (Dooley 37). Resistance produces drama, and drama opens up a vast, overlapping field of sensation. Through a close reading of Coetzee's 'Disgrace', this essay will track the difficult and complex moments of resistance and sensation that structure and drive the novel. In 'Disgrace', the ethical possibilities and limits of our relationships to others and to ourselves is dramatised through the complicated entanglement of emotions, duties and desires that ask us fully to dwell within the world of matter and sensation.