Pointing Fingers

So we’ve come back to these questions: Is a work racist? And if a work is racist does that mean that the writer is a racist?

I think there is enough evidence in the novel that supports the notion that David Lurie himself may harbor some racist sentiments and that many of the principle characters in the work may be guilty of the sort of “educated liberal” form of racism we’ve discussed before. Lurie’s presumptuous treatment of Soraya and in the way he speaks about Petrus both before and after the attack on the farm. I hold and have always held the belief that Lurie is in many ways an old style racist and were he in apartheid times he might not make such an effort to hide it. However this racism is another form of the elitism that we’ve seen him exhibit throughout the novel, he’s not a foaming at the mouth bigot because he thinks he’s better than black people because he thinks he’s better than everybody.

Still that’s not enough to paint the entire novel as a racist work. I think that in order to properly categorize any work as “racist” there has to be sense that this notion is being promoted and characterized as a proper and just mindset. This doesn’t appear anywhere in the work. There is some justification to Lurie’s treatment of Petrus because of his involvement in the attack on him and Lucy and even Ettinger’s more direct racism seems to borne out of a legitimate fear of losing his land to black farmers. But neither of these thinkings are promoted as the best way of life in the novel if anything both are seen as falsehoods and improper ways of viewing the world as a whole but for the situation these characters find themselves in it is their natural response.

Colonization in Coetzee

Its there but it’s hazy.

We have a white man in South Africa working for a university wherein her meets and begins an affair with his (presumably Asian looking) young female student. All of theses things have been used to classically represent either side of the power structure in a Colonialist state. And power is the most important thing about colonization and sex, the thing which this section was most concerned with.

Lurie’s dealings with Soraya are possibly the best stand in for the relationship between a colonizer and its conquest. Soraya is a black prostitite sells her body to white men with money and being in that station means that Lurie and her other clients don't have to actually think of her as a human being of any sort. No matter how much he may convince himself that there is something other than a business arrangement between that will never be the case. Soraya isn't even her real name and that doesn't matter to him either, just the experience does.

Her removal from the life can be seen as the act of rebellion and her commanding tone when Lurie attempts to contact her is a post-colonialist assertion of identity against her former imperial master. But Lurie is still in that haze of conquest and still feels he has a right to dominate women.

This is why he seems to be caught in a tailspin when the Isaacs scandal erupts. He failed to recognize that the world had changed and those who were oppressed have gained the power to combat their abusers.