Unspeakable Injuries in Disgrace and David's Story

Authors

Gillian Gane

Abstract

Coincidentally two major novels about the New South Africa both have protagonists called David; David Lurie in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace is an aging white man, ‘a moral dinosaur’, in his daughter’s words (89), a man unwilling to change in a world that is changing: ‘I am not prepared to be reformed’, he says (77). David Dirkse in Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story, by contrast, has devoted his life to bringing about political change in South Africa; he has long been involved in the guerrilla struggle and holds high office in Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the African National Congress. Like his comrade-in-arms Dulcie, he is ‘coloured’, in the traditional South African terminology; one strand of the novel is about his quest for his ancestors among the Griqua, a people tracing their ancestry back to the earliest Khoi inhabitants of South Africa, but mixed with many other racial groups.1

Recommended Citation

Gane, Gillian, Unspeakable Injuries in Disgrace and David's Story, Kunapipi, 24(1), 2002.
Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol24/iss1/11