Literary Criticism
Page 14
he continues, because it leads to consciousness. The two notions – suffering and consciousness
– have a complicated
relationship in the text, each necessitating the other and making the
other possible. For this reason, man
will never give up suffering, since man needs to be
conscious and have his free will. He will even purposely cause himself pain to prove that he's
free to do so.
Like many of J.M. Coetzee's novels,
Disgrace takes place in his native South Africa, a
country that for many years was ruled under a system of racial segregation called Apartheid.
Apartheid, which in Afrikaans means "separateness," was a system held in place from 1948
until 1994. It was official policy under which the rights of blacks were severely limited and
under which whites, though the
minority in terms of numbers, were in charge. Under
Apartheid, blacks were not even considered to be legal citizens of South Africa, and they were
forced to attend separate schools, go to separate hospitals, and receive separate public services.
When blacks were deprived of their citizenship, they were divided into self-governing tribes
called Bantustans.
Disgrace takes place only several years after the end of Apartheid,
and as a result,
knowing a little bit about the geography and systems of Apartheid are really helpful in
understanding the undertones of this book. The novel begins in the far Western reaches of
South Africa in Cape Town, where David is a professor at the University.
Cape Town was
generally considered to be part of "white" South Africa during Apartheid. In Disgrace, we see it
as being more developed and cosmopolitan. When David leaves to go to live with Lucy in
Salem, he's headed to a completely different part of the country: the Eastern Cape, which was
long considered to be part of "black" South Africa and where the Bantustans were established.
It is similar with the social setting of
Notes from the Underground where that times
that Russia in the transition in being civilized by adopting the European culture. That was
Dostoevsky's time/place context for writing this work, but it's also the time and place in which
the Underground Man is set
. Notes from Underground is set in the city of St. Petersburg (now
Leningrad) in nineteenth-century Russia. Unlike other cities of Europe, it has no long history
since it was only established at the beginning of the eighteenth century by Peter the Great.
Built to be the seat of government, St. Petersburg was designed as an impressive city. It was
laid
out with symmetrical streets, and Italian and French architects produced magnificent
palaces to be built there. By the nineteenth century, the time of the novel, St. Petersburg had
become a bustling city on the Gulf of Finland. Turgenev, Chernyshevsky, the Crystal Palace,
rational egoism, socialism, the fall of the feudal system – these
all compose the setting for
Notes and the intellectual environment to which the Underground Man is responding.