Putting the subjective on hold

I have recently read Disgrace, the novel by J.M. Coetzee which was recently awarded the Commonwealth Prize in Delhi at the end of an excit...

I have recently read Disgrace, the novel by J.M. Coetzee which was recently awarded the Commonwealth Prize in Delhi at the end of an exciting literary week. I read the book straight through, not because it is `sensational’, or `shocking’ or `astounding’, as a lot of writing tends to be these days, but because well, because I wanted to go on reading it.

The story concerns a white professor at a South African university, David Lurie, who is accused of sexually harassing a student and has to leave in disgrace. He goes to stay with his daughter who lives on a farm in the country, surrounded largely by non-white rural folk. While he is there the father and daughter are attacked, and the latter is raped by a gang of black youths. Their car is stolen, and the dogs which are boarded on the farm are brutally shot. By the end of the book, we discover that the daughter is pregnant. Lurie remains in the country, fervently attempting to bring the culprits to justice.

This unedifying series of events takes on a supreme importance as we read the book, because we are so intensely involved with Lurie’s experience and his views of it. That view, as we might expect, is `politically incorrect’ in many ways. Nonetheless and this is the point our empathy with Lurie does not convert us to the `incorrect’ view, any more than our involvement with Macbeth turns us all into murderers. Quite the contrary after living the whole thing through David Lurie’s mind, the biggest impression on us is that of the enormity, the horror, the tragedy of colonial exploitation.

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And this is a paradox about subjective experience which contemporary art, in its anxiety to be correct, sometimes forgets. Individual experience when it is experienced, and not escaped has a way of taking you right through your own point of view and coming out at the other end. If this were not so, why do we while reading great 19th century novels, which see things largely through the tunnel of a single person’s experience, find it impossible not to remember other persons and other families?

The great writers of the Partition do not feel the need to distribute suffering even-handedly between the communities. They deal with any one group and then leave it to you to deduce whether it can have been any different for the other.

Unfortunately, the division, the suspicion, the mutual mistrust in today’s world have made it necessary for people of goodwill to put subjective experience on hold and instead give nervous expression only to `correctness’. Essential as correctness is, it is no substitute for the healthy natural reactions in a society that has division. After the `Sikh problem’ arose, the well-intentioned majority, concentrated strenuously on not offending. Let us hope that this leads us back to the earlier situation, one where all of us together heartily enjoyed Sardarji jokes, or indeed those concerning any other community.