Bricolage, the Odyssey and postapartheid South Africa in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

Abstract

Disgrace is J. M. Coetzee's first novel to be set in postapartheid South Africa. In my paper, I examine how the novel addresses questions of the postapartheid South African nation through its intertextual relationship with the Odyssey and other Odyssean texts like Ulysses. I first suggest that two Odyssean parallels exist subtextually in Disgrace. In the first parallel, the Odyssean narrative serves as a commentary on how, after many long years of exile and dispossession, black South African in the postapartheid phase have come to reclaim their (home)land. The Odyssean parallel serves to reinforce the homecoming of black South Africans. In the second parallel, one finds Coetzee subjecting the Odyssey to the process of bricolage with the result that this foundational text of Western culture appears in the novel in a condition of fragments, as mere odds and ends. Coetzee's fragmentation of the Odyssey signals the end of white cultural dominance in South Africa; indeed, I will show that the Odyssey is literally subjected to erasure in Disgrace, aptly underscoring the dissolution of Western foundations in the postapartheid nation. Finally, I will also suggest how the novel seeks to go beyond a nation·centric paradigm in its reconfiguration of Homeric epic.