Richard of st victor on the trinity summary

Summary Of McDonald's Essay

3: “Is it too late to educate the eye?”: David Lurie, Richard of St. Victor, and “vision as eros” in Disgrace

Bill McDonald

In your own Bosom you bear your Heaven And earth, & all that you behold, tho’ it appears Without, it is Within In your Imagination, of which this world of Mortality is but Shadow.

— Blake, Jerusalem

I

DAVID LURIE’S PAST IS LARGELY A BLANK SLATE to readers of Disgrace. We know only a few things about his academic career, and even less about his upbringing, marriages, politics, and religion. We do learn, in a fast-moving paragraph, that David was raised “in a family of women. As mother, aunts, sisters fell away, they were replaced in due course by mis- tresses, wives, a daughter. The company of women made him a lover of women and, to an extent, a womanizer. . . . That was how he lived for years, for decades, that was the backbone of his life” (7). Mothers and sisters, aunts and wives, then a little later “tourists” and “wives of col- leagues” (7) appear, then immediately “fall away” from our view, with only Rosalind, wife number two, surviving the sentences that created her. We are left largely with surmises: that he received some musical educa- tion, went somewhere to graduate school, has taught for something like a quarter of a century, and thought a photograph of his mother as a young woman worth displaying (15). It’s hard to imagine him with sis- ters.

We also know that David wrote and published three books in earlier phases of his academic career. None of them “caused a stir or even a rip- ple” (4). Though he is “tired of criticism” now, these books that he wrote about “dead people” once commanded his “heart” (162). It gradually becomes clear that the subjects of these books, though unremarked by David’s peers, have remained very much in play in his consciousness and especially his subliminal life, inaugurating, even shaping, aspects of his

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee's Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700. Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:04:00.

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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 65

present experience. Two of them — Boito and the Faust Legend: The Genesis of Mefistofele, and Wordsworth and the Burden of the Past — do so in immediately apparent ways; the slow evolution of David’s own opera on Byron and Teresa Guiccioli runs throughout the story, and his specializa- tion in Romanticism — “Wordsworth has been one of my masters” (13) — yields the two classroom scenes we visit, as well as several other impor- tant passages in his narrative. Sandwiched in between, however, is a seem- ingly anomalous project, The Vision of Richard of St. Victor. The writings of an ascetic Scots contemplative in a medieval French monastery seem well removed from David’s artistic interests and melancholy secularism; though David may satirize his students’ “post-Christian” attitudes (32), he seems to share them (for example, 172). Yet as a young scholar David Lurie thought enough of Richard’s work to devote an entire book to him, a task that required considerable time, a mastery of Latin and the com- plexities of medieval theology, and at least some sympathy with the con- templative life. “Vision as eros” is his book’s theme, and while Lurie tells us nothing else directly about his interpretation, Richard’s writing, like Boito’s opera and Wordsworth’s poetry, becomes an intriguing intertext in David’s psychic life, giving the reader another, and even more venera- ble, set of frames for following his journey. Richard’s visionary passion also runs under the surface of Coetzee’s novel, helping to shape its affirmation of what he elsewhere calls “mystical intuition,”1 and weaving that vision- ary experience into the aesthetics and the ethics of Disgrace. Coetzee’s Latin, “the only language I studied at university,” stood him in good stead.2

First, a few general things about Richard’s accounts of the visionary as they affect Disgrace. His descriptions anticipate, and resemble, the accounts of many later visionaries; in addition to Richard, David himself cites Dante, Langland, Byron, Blake, Wordsworth, Yeats, and Rilke. They also resemble the intuited beginnings of fictions that many writers have recounted: the mysterious appearance of a gesture, a voice, a character in motion from “outside” consciousness. In addition, the visionary con- nects with the ethical choices that David makes at the end of his story; it leads to, but doesn’t compel, those decisions. To elaborate just a little, the visionary elements are not in themselves decisive or completing; nei- ther David nor the novel ends with a vision. They enrich David’s self- understanding but also highlight some unchanging, and unwelcome, qualities of his character. The novel insists on open-endedness, both because it sees character change as real but always partial, and because the novel itself illuminates, then rejects, any definitive authority. Finality — in vision, in character, in ethical action — is a fiction this fiction stands against.

In what follows I argue that the visionary, the aesthetic, and the ethical are interwoven in the book in ways vital to its meanings.

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee's Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700. Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:04:00.

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66 ! BILL MCDONALD

II, i

Richard (d. 1173), associate of Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas of Canterbury and successor of the more famous Hugh of St. Victor, holds a significant place in Catholic mystical thinking. He was known as the “Magnus Contemplator,” after his treatise “De Contemplatione,” which Dante mentions in the Paradiso as putting forward “all that a mere man can see, and more” (X, 131–32, Ciardi translation). His writings were actively sought out by other monasteries, praised by St. Bonaventure, and included not only contemplative subjects but pedagogic ones as well; like his master Hugh, he wrote specifically to instruct as well as to reveal (St. Victor’s teaching program was copied throughout Europe).3 The narrative of Jacob and his family in Genesis provided the scaffold upon which he built a remarkable account of contemplation, while his familiarity with St. Augustine’s writings shaped its terminology and modes of argument.

Richard is read today largely for three texts: Twelve Patriarchs or Benjamin Minor: Of the preparation of the soul for contemplation; The Mystical Ark or Benjamin Major: Of the grace of contemplation; and for his remarkable work on the Trinity.4 The first two titles are taken from Psalm 67 (68 in the KJV and RSV), where Jacob’s youngest son Benjamin, “the least of them” (ibi Beniamin parvulus continens eos), leads the solemn vic- tory procession of God’s faithful into the sanctuary. In the Benjamin Minor Richard aligns himself with the tradition of allegorizing not only Benjamin’s position as the youngest son, but Jacob’s entire family, assign- ing a stage or “discipline” in spiritual development to his wives Leah and Rachel, their handmaidens, and the birth order of his thirteen children. So, Dan (judgment) and Naphtali (conversion) defend the soul (Benjamin Minor, 17–22), Issachar expresses its joy and reward (37–39), Dina its shame (45–59), Joseph its discretion (67–72), and Benjamin the ecstasy of contemplation and interior visions of light (71–75, 82–87). Richard for- mulates the basic distinction between reason, “by which we distinguish things,” and affection, “by which we love,” in this way: “These are the two wives of the rational spirit, from which honorable offspring and heirs of the kingdom of heaven are born. Right counsels are born from reason; holy longings from affection” (3). Longing is identified with Leah, who strug- gles to move past the pleasure of worldly objects, while Rachel, the alle- gorical embodiment of reason, prepares the way for the trans-rational visions that only her son Benjamin can achieve. Richard works each of these figures in many ways; his allegories are subtle, not reductive or naïve as this quick summary might suggest. Each stage involves a material or historical event, and an accompanying symbolic event in the spirit. These offer a path not only to seminarians, but to any individuals seeking spiritual insight into their own experience; Richard wishes to show the way to a large audience. Self-consciously citing Christ’s example, Richard sees him-

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee's Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700. Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:04:00.

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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 67

self as a committed teacher as well as thinker (“Learn from me, because I am gentle and lowly in heart).5 His path repeats a familiar, even archetypal, journey in Western mysticism: from immediate sensuous experience through the complex stages of mental apprehension and meditation — what we would call psychology — to the many layers of contemplation. (These stages align with the many secular accounts given by verbal artists of their creative process.) Self-knowledge is a necessary achievement for the contemplative life, and Richard describes the many difficulties and limitations in the way of that achievement. Finally, it is a path that empha- sizes relationships with others and the importance of full community where love may be enacted. That love (charity) may be “violent” (De Quatuor gradibus violentiae amoris: On the Four Degrees of Violent Charity), but after its “wounding, binding and languishing” we arrive at the soul reborn (paragraphs 42–47) as it takes on the form of Christ’s humility and servanthood, becoming all things to all men . . .” (DeQuator, #42–47; Zinn, 9).

II, ii

Among the most telling of Richard’s analyses for Disgrace comes in chap- ters 45–49 of Benjamin Minor, where he develops a model of shame. Ironically, Richard writes more about Jacob’s oft-neglected only daughter Dina (Dinah) than any of her brothers except Joseph and Benjamin, mark- ing shame as a virtue of serious import in his schema.6 He has a number of things to say about shame and disgrace that resonate with Coetzee’s novel.7 Shame, first, requires the right timing to be powerful, underlining the violence of the process. It requires “hatred” of whatever act led to the person’s shame. It has two stages: the lower one of public exposure; and the higher, spiritually more potent one of internal shame of one’s act.

These are stages that David clearly moves through. His disgrace comes just at the moment that his belief in any meaningful future collapses (for example, 7, 11, 58). His public disgrace comes well before his interior acceptance of it. While David never “hates” the desire that led to his dis- grace, after Lucy’s rape he does fully acknowledge the offense he commit- ted against the Isaacs family (163–74, especially 173). Part of the higher shame is an awareness of one’s own moral depletion, something that David gradually comes to acknowledge.

One of “virtuous shame’s” characteristics is the ability to not feel shame if “you should be compelled to pass before a multitude with a nude body” (47). Richard contrasts this to being “defiled in the mind by an impure thought,” a spiritual nudity that, in the right-spirited should pro- duce more shame than public nakedness. Such shame is rare in Richard’s accounting, and far up the ladder of inner virtue his students are mount-

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee's Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700. Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:04:00.

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68 ! BILL MCDONALD

ing. Dinah “is that judgment by which everyone is by his own conscience addressed, convicted, condemned and punished with a punishment worthy of the disorder” (48). Shame requires self-consciousness, and is “marve- lous” and universal; in spiritual shame the judge and judged, the punisher and punished, become one. Disgrace, then, is a particular kind of virtue, not simply an abasement; it contains within itself, literally and figuratively, a potential of grace.

An important initial step toward this virtuous shame lies in David’s superficially surprising reaction to his colleagues’ ridicule, the dunce-cap newspaper photograph, and so on. He never seems to suffer the crushing humiliations of public unmasking that many men in his position might feel. He can tell his story with relative ease to his colleagues, and to Rosalind, Bev, even to Lucy. This is because his disgrace grows out of two things: his self-satisfying desire, which in the novel’s early pages he prizes above all else; and its near opposite: the despair he feels at having no future — pedagogic, familial, scholarly, artistic, and especially erotic — that unmasking might damage. There is no “public” whose opinion his life’s meaning depends upon. And this in turn makes David more open to dis- grace’s virtue: an internal, spiritual condition in which he resides, and of which he will never entirely be free.

II, iii

Ethics is the arena in which the claims of otherness — the moral law, the human other, cultural norms, the good-in-itself, etc. — are artic- ulated and negotiated.

— Geoffrey Harpham, Shadows of Ethics

Dinah, of course, is a rape victim in Genesis, assaulted by Sichem, son of Emor. Richard allegorizes these two Shechemites as “Love of Vain Glory” and “Love of One’s Own Excellence,” since they willingly cir- cumcise themselves for Dinah (not God), glorying in their shame. Richard’s idealized, “feminine” descriptions of “beautiful” Dinah, how- ever, seem almost an inversion, a predictably pre-feminist inversion, of Lucy. And any allegorical connection between the two Shechemites and Lucy’s three assailants seems remote or perverse, though her attackers could be construed as fathers and son, and could well be said to “glory in their shame” of humiliating a woman whose ancestors had humiliated them. But Lucy’s experience of disgrace, her withdrawal into a private world, does form an illuminating connection with Richard’s portrait of Dinah as “that judgment” (48). This is not the more public judgment allegorized in her brother Dan, but a particular form of interior self- evaluation. Just so, Lucy’s shame is of a particular, subtle kind: not the

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee's Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700. Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:04:00.

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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 69

public shame of rape itself, as she might have had to endure in a fully patriarchal world, but a disgrace connected with the post-apartheid inter- regnum in which she lives, and which only she can feel.8 Lucy’s silent self-judgment castigates her own idealizations of a new, harmonious rural South Africa, where hard work and neighborly cooperation could leave both her commune days and apartheid’s violence behind. Her naïveté is encapsulated in the novel’s most suspenseful moment, when she chooses to lock up her two Dobermans while her assaulters look on. In her zeal not to be racist, to help bring about the new era through her trusting actions, Lucy exposes herself to the “personal hatred” of her rapists; she is not just an abstract “white person” or even “white woman” to them, she feels later, but an object of immediate, intimate hatred. Harassed by her father, who wants to control her life story as he had when she was a child (for example, 89, 105, 198), Lucy slowly, and quietly, develops her own well-tempered narrative, judging that she must endure the personal, inward shame of rape and untutored optimism in order to gain peace, continuation, and the Petrus-guaranteed safe boundaries of her house (208).

II, iv

In The Mystical Ark Richard isolates six modes of contemplation (I: 6) and develops a tropological (ethical, and also visionary) taxonomy of those modes. The lower stages outline the interrelationships of imagination and reason, the final two moving “above,” then “beyond” reason to ecstasy. All are seen, finally, as manifestations of the divine, with the high spiritual world of the Trinity at the apex of the six stages. Further, any object what- soever can become a proper object for contemplation.

At first this rapturous Christianity might seem to exclude David Lurie, who, a few undeveloped references to pre-existing souls and God aside, seems little drawn to the divine. Lurie’s understanding of vision, further, is certainly mediated through “my master” Wordsworth and the Romantics, to whom he has devoted the largest part of his scholarship and teaching. Nonetheless, Richard’s way of seeing, and his accounts of contemplative states, make their way into David’s experience, and into the novel’s tex- ture. They flow along with, even anchor, the more familiar visionary com- pany of the poets. They also present the life of contemplation as objective and universal, not simply personal and idiosyncratic: a making substantial that Coetzee hopes for in his fiction as well.9 Finally, Richard’s account of the visionary includes, but is not limited to, momentary epiphanies, the legendary “flash of insight”; the contemplative life also takes place in time and over time.10 It is narrative as well as lyric, both of which will figure in David’s history.

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee's Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700. Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:04:00.

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70 ! BILL MCDONALD

In his excellent introductory monograph to his edition of Richard’s writings, translator Grover A. Zinn gives a concise summary of Richard’s great subject: “By contemplation Richard means an attitude of mind, a state of beholding.” He defines contemplation as “. . . the free, more pen- etrating gaze of a mind, suspended with wonder concerning manifestations of wisdom” (The Mystical Ark, I: 4). Zinn continues:

Contemplation . . . is an attentive or eager looking at. Above all it must be clearly understood that contemplation is not some sort of mental proc- ess. Richard . . . is careful to distinguish thinking (a rather rambling consideration of many things without purpose) . . . from the act of con- templating. The contemplative act itself is an intent beholding focused upon a single object or cluster of objects presented to the mind by imagination, reason or the pure understanding that alone has access to divine things. . . . The purpose of contemplation is not thinking about something . . . but “adhering with wonder to the object that brings it joy” (I: 4). It is nondiscussive and unified. It enjoys rather than uses. It rests rather than acts. (23–24)

Once his conception of contemplation is clear, Richard goes on to posit biblical personifications, urging the novice contemplative to substitute himself for, imagine himself as, a great biblical figure. Each of these figures — and he includes a great variety, from Abraham to the Queen of Sheba — exemplifies a distinctive stage of contemplative realization. Richard also insists that at least some of the objects of contemplation, though not the highest, can be “brought down for the understanding of all” (IV, 12). In so claiming he continues his pedagogic emphasis from Benjamin Minor, establishing an ethical practice.

Beyond all this, however, lies the fundamental feature of Richard’s inquiry into contemplation: the reservoir of erotic metaphors and allego- ries that charge and enliven his work. Beyond Jacob and his family, “The Song of Songs” suffuses much of Richard’s writing, and the traditional figures of bride and bridegroom for the soul and God take on special savor in his formulations. Naturally this is a sublimated eros, an eros marking love, and also desire and longing, in their widest applications, but Richard doesn’t shy away from the explicitly sexual in the rapture of his vision.11 Here is a representative example, one that might almost serve as an outline of the later stages of David’s difficult spiritual journey:

And so when the soul enters with her Beloved into the bedchamber, she alone delaying and enjoying the sweetness with Him alone . . . she forgets all external things and delights in supreme and intimate love of Him. She sees herself, alone with the Beloved, when, after having forgotten all exterior things, she aims her longing away from consideration of herself and toward love of her Beloved. And on account of these things that she considers in her inmost places, she kindles her soul with such affection

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee's Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700. Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:04:00.

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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 71

and rises up with thanksgiving from the consideration of both her goods and her evils. . . . Think what is in your life that you have loved more ardently, craved more anxiously; what affected you more pleasantly and delighted you more deeply than all other things. Consider, therefore, if you feel the same force of affection and abundance of delight when you burn with longing for the supreme Lover and when you rest in His love. Who doubts that He does not yet occupy that innermost recess of your affections if the dart of intimate love pierces your soul less and excites it less fervently in divine affections than it was accustomed to penetrate and excite it sometimes with respect to alien affections? (Benjamin Major, IV, 16)

Also important for Disgrace is Richard’s late treatise on the Trinity, whose third book develops an ingenious argument for a Three-in-One God based on the principle of active love, or charity:

When one person gives love to another and he alone loves only the other, there certainly is love [dilectio] but it is not a shared love [condilectio]. When two love each other mutually and give to each other the affection of supreme longing; when the affection of the first goes out to the second and the affection of the second goes out to the first and tends as it were in diverse ways — in this case there certainly is love on both sides, but it is not shared love. Shared love is properly said to exist when a third per- son is loved by two persons harmoniously and in community, and the affection of the two persons is fused into one affection by the flame of love for the third. From these things it is evident that shared love would have no place in Divinity itself if a third person were lacking to the other two persons.12

In order for God to be fully charitable, fully loving, he must be tripartite. Richard extends this interpretation to the human community, which also requires a third person to be complete. This recondite “vision as eros” with its “flame of love” and preference for threesomes will inform several of the novel’s many triangular relationships, particularly the final one at the book’s close.

Necessarily, Richard’s overt allegories and unself-conscious erotic celebrations do not appear directly in Coetzee’s rigorously self-moni- toring novel. Instead Coetzee gives us fiction in which the allegorical is fluid rather than fixed, and which constantly scrutinizes its own foun- dations. Fredric Jameson’s succinct account of the first of these permu- tations of allegory, often endorsed by Coetzee’s critics, can help us along:

The newer allegory is horizontal rather than vertical: if it must still attach its one-on-one conceptual labels to its objects after the fashion of The Pilgrim’s Progress, it does so in the conviction that those objects (along with their labels) are now profoundly relational, indeed are themselves

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee's Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700. Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:04:00.

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72 ! BILL MCDONALD

construed by their relations to each other. When we add to this the inevitable mobility of such relations, we begin to glimpse the process of allegorical interpretation as a kind of scanning that, moving back and forth across the text, readjusts its terms in constant modification of a type quite different from our stereotypes of some static medieval or biblical decoding.13

This account brilliantly summarizes an important part of Coetzee’s prac- tice in Disgrace. Think, for example, of the book’s multifarious triangles, or of how our view of Bev Shaw shifts registers from just another “dumpy woman” in David’s catalog to a rescuing angel. It is also con- sonant with the novel’s refusal of finality in its characters’ lives or in its own ethical position. Working in this mode, Coetzee turns the gap between Richard’s spiritual universe and our own to his artistic advan- tage; any resonant eros-vision now surprises both character and reader, appearing dramatically in a world from which such things have long since been discounted by tough-minded realists such as Lucy, David, and, presumably, the reader. The surprise creates an authority, giving us a sense of a voice from elsewhere — not necessarily the “higher” else- where of traditional allegory — and that authority in turn sustains alle- gorical meaning. In this way Richard’s visionary insights make their way into Coetzee’s novel, further developing the similarities between reli- gious and artistic visions. He draws on the “horizontal” allegory favored by postmodernism but in a way that maintains a shadow version of Richard’s confident practice. Coetzee’s allegory is arguably more impor- tant for his political and ethical purposes than for his exploration of the visionary, but it plays a vital part here as well. It also gives us a way to see the history of the visionary.

Within these frames I shall show that David’s major visions are charged with the erotic energy Richard celebrated, and that the allegorical and intertextual triumphalism of his treatises leaves its mark on David’s artistic and ethical life even as it once occupied his scholarly life. For example, he comes to re-see his imagined Teresa Guiccioli as an allegorical figure whom he tries to emulate; no longer the young girl he forcibly shaped in early drafts, she metamorphoses into a “dumpy little widow” who paradoxically becomes his teacher about love and longing (181–85, 213–14). Second, Richard’s writings also touch Disgrace itself, not only its main character. As we have seen, Richard’s elaborate “personification allegory” of Jacob’s daughter Dinah — her shame via rape — underwrites Lucy’s tragedy, and Richard’s claims about the psychology of shame and disgrace color the novel’s exploration of those subjects. Most important, however, are two related topics that lie at the heart of David Lurie and the fiction that gives him voice: love and the visionary. “Vision as eros”: what David has sought his entire life, from his “womanizing” days and practiced urban gaze to the transforming visions near the end of his narrative, and where for David and

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee's Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700. Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:04:00.

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LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 73

Disgrace itself the aesthetic, spiritual, and ethical come together — at least for a time.

III

Stories, whether written as novels or scripted as plays, connect the visible with the invisible, the present with the past. They propose life as something with moral consequence. They distribute the suffering so that it can be borne . . .

— E. L. Doctorow. From the introduction to Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993–2006

Throughout his writing career J. M. Coetzee has explored the visionary. His leading characters all experience powerful visions, from Jacobus Coetzee of Dusklands and Magda of In the Heart of the Country (“What I lack in experience I plainly make up for in vision . . .” [42]) through the Magistrate of Waiting for the Barbarians, with his recurring dream-visions of children and his fantasy of flying, all the way to Elizabeth Costello. The heroine of Age of Iron, Elizabeth Curren, has at least twenty such experi- ences over the course of her story. Many of these are brief and, to repeat, closely resemble other artists’ accounts of the intuitions that launched their work. Others are more extended and intertextual, creating an overt or, more often, an unspoken dialogue with an earlier text. In Youth (2002) Coetzee narrativizes his own visionary experience as a young man in London, lying alone on Hampstead Heath:

Tired out, one Sunday afternoon, he folds his jacket into a pillow, stretches out on the greensward, and sinks into a sleep or half-sleep in which consciousness does not vanish but continues to hover. It is a state he has not known before: in his very blood he seems to feel the steady wheeling of the earth. The faraway cries of children, the birdsong, the whirr of insects gather force and come together in a paean of joy. His heart swells. At last! he thinks. At last it has come, the moment of ecstatic unity with the All! Fearful that the moment will slip away, he tries to put a halt to the clatter of thought, tries simply to be a conduit for the great universal force that has no name.

It lasts no more than seconds in clock time, this signal event. But when he gets up and dusts off his jacket, he is refreshed, renewed. . . . If he has not utterly been transfigured, then at least he has been blessed with a hint that he belongs on this earth. (117: see also 154)

In the face of Disgrace’s pared-down style and strong skepticism about the metaphysical, such visionary experiences — both those that break into David’s consciousness and those that he, following Richard, consciously sustains — yield our only access to a spiritual life beyond, or alongside, the

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee's Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,