always in grey

Coetzee’s book was in heated controversy, with people pouring out their own side of stories. In my mind, this is reminiscent of the book ‘heart of darkness.’ Both of the books, ‘disgrace’ and ‘heart of darkness,’ were considered as a racist book for exactly the same reason. Their description of black people reflected the sense in which whites viewed blacks as less humans. The fact that Coetzee rarely spoke about his move to Australia and his obtaining of citizenship there, and his refusal to an interview about the article in which much speculating has been mentioned regarding this very issue, makes the idea about him grow that he obviously doesn’t want to take a position in which he would be forced to answer to the question he doesn’t want to address. Be whoever you may be,- black person, literary person, and so on- the reason you may come up with in arguing that his book ‘disgrace’ is or is not a racist book, have fairness and justification in itself. I believe, at least, that what makes a book or an author a racist is largely subjective an issue. A form of art, whether it’s a painting or a piece of literature, can be always argued in both ways and it has been so.
As to the author’s responsibility regarding his or her view in the text, I’d say, concerning Coetzee, that he is just being aggressively loyal to what he (or Lurie) feels and experiences, and that would be his foremost responsibility as a writer. This is again, in a grey area because though there are clearly certain boundaries that have been set concerning what can be or cannot be printed on papers, these restrictions aren’t necessarily playing their roles. If they did, some of the books that we read nowadays wouldn’t be out in the market. I think it’s just a bunch of forces moving about, whether it’s regulations or opinions on what is or is not exactly a racist, trying to move against one another, trying to make one’s reason more absolute over the other.