J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and the Task of the Imagination

In an early review of Disgrace, Jane Taylor first relates this novels treatment of violence in post-apartheid South Africa to the European Enlightenment's legacy ofthe autonomy ofthe human subject (25), in terms of which each individual is conceived of as a living consciousness separated totally from every other consciousness, and then discusses J.M. Coetzee's postulation of the sympathetic imagination as a potential corrective to the violence attendant on monadic individuality Taylor makes the telling point that, in the eighteenth century, the notions of sensibility, sympathy, and compassion, which the novel repeatedly invokes, were self-consciously developed as an ethical response to the instrumentalist logic of autonomous individuality and, in this regard, she cites Adam Smith's observation in The Theory ofMoral Sentiments that "By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensation" (qtd. in Taylor 25). Relatively few ofthe many subsequent readings of Disgrace have elaborated on Taylor's necessarily cursory examination of the role of the imagination in Disgrace. For the most part, this aspect of the novel seems to be regarded as a self-evident given and therefore not in need of elaboration. When critical discussions ofthe text do touch on the imagination, they tend automatically to assume that Coetzee deems this faculty capable of countering the individual's solipsistic concern with itself. By extension, they assume that the Bildung which Coetzee's protagonist, David Lurie, undergoes in the course of Disgrace involves the successful development of a sympathetic imagination and hence the capacity to empathize with the other.1