| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 外國語文學系所 === 105 === Disgrace is a novel published in 1999, written by South African novelist J. M. Coetzee. Although there were many comments on it when the novel was released, it still won Coetzee his second Booker Prize. Disgrace sets it background in the post-apartheid South Africa, describing an aged White professor David Lurie’s life. Except the male protagonist, there are still other female characters who disclose the struggles and dilemmas of life in the postcolonial context. Disgrace displays not only David’s frustration and loss; it also displays the effects of colonialism on the people. David does not lose his subjectivity, but wanders in the gap of past and now. He cannot give away the past glory of dominance, yet he cannot catch up to the trend now. Female characters encounter different struggles and dilemmas but they are striving for their own subjectivities.
To begin interpreting the novel, I approach postcolonialism mainly from Bhabha’s mimicry, which renders the colonized people distorted figures neither of their original form nor the colonizer’s form. Then, I introduce Lévinas’s ethics of the relation between “I” and the other. Lévinas’s subversive ethical relation redefines the relation of “I” and the other; “I” am not the center of a relation but “I” have to respond to the existence of the other’s face. In this, I find that David turns his sense of loss into a desire for the other, for women in order to compensate for his loss. The other female characters and David’s daughter Lucy are not that silent in the novel as the novel apparently shows. Woman is intimately related to the dwelling; in this relation they assert their subjectivities without words. Despite the unfavorable ending, the characters advance on possibilities by Lévinas’s ethics in the postcolonial context.
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