Art as a Balance Between the Past and the Present in 'Disgrace' Michelle Qiu College

There are multiple works of art discussed in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, including poems that the central character, David Lurie, teaches his class, dances, and Lurie’s opera. This brings up the question of why these works of art are included. Perhaps an answer can be found by looking at how art functions for Lurie in this novel, which has parallels to how Disgrace as a work of art can function for the reader.

Lurie’s first interpretation of art comes during Lurie and Melanie’s first encounter, when Lurie shows Melanie a dance he had seen once before. He describes being “captivated” by "the instant of the present and the past of that instant, evanescent, caught up in the same space," (14). In this moment, there is ambiguity in exactly which moments of the past and past of that instant he is captivated by. There is the moment of the past when Lurie first saw this dance and the past of that instant which is him remembering the initial viewing in the second viewing. Another interpretation is that this moment is a present romantic tryst while he is simultaneously thinking about his past romances, which is allowing the two to exist in the same space. Although he does not reference specific romances, he worries in this scene with...