The Discourse of Jewish Difference in J. M. Coetzee's <em>Disgrace</em>

Abstract

During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the South African plaasroman or pastoral novel depicted white physical labor in the countryside and elided black labor, which functioned to legitimize Afrikaner ownership of African land. As J. M. Coetzee demonstrates in White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988), commonplace in the plaasroman is the figure of the Jew, who attempts to swindle the farm from its rightful, white owner. Coetzee's novel Disgrace (1999) seeks to destabilize the ideological underpinnings of the pastoral novel by means of inverting its discursive elements. Therefore, in his anti-pastoral novel Disgrace, Coetzee replaces the plaasroman's white male patriarch with that genre's metaphor of otherness, the Jew. The Jew's ambivalent whiteness allows for such a transposition, whereas the protagonist's "Jewish" body results in his weakness and inability to work the land, which subverts the plaasroman's mythic inscription of the countryside as property of the white peasantry.