Disgrace and the Neighbor An Interchange with Bill McDonald
Disgrace and the Neighbor:
An Interchange with Bill McDonald
Kenneth Reinhard
IN HIS ESSAY, “‘IS IT TO LATE TO EDUCATE THE EYE?’: David Lurie, Richard of St. Victor, and ‘vision as eros’ in Disgrace,” Bill McDonald is primarily concerned with the nature of erotic vision in Coetzee’s novel, and the pos- sibilities – and limitations – of the redemption that vision represents. The central character in Disgrace, David Lurie, is a literary critic, and McDonald has taken seriously the account we are given of Lurie’s main scholarly works, in particular, his monograph on the twelfth-century Christian mys- tic, Richard of St. Victor. McDonald shows how this work, as well as Lurie’s books on Boito’s opera Mefistofele and Wordsworth’s sense of history, informs the development of Lurie’s character, as well as Coetzee’s novel on a more structural level. McDonald describes the transformation of Lurie’s “disgrace” into a kind of “grace,” parallel with, as McDonald writes, “the contemplative, ascetic spirit” if not the precise stages of the soul’s journey to redemption described in Richard’s writings…
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