How Many New Novels are Published Each Year?

In my recent talks, I’ve been saying things like “there are tens or hundreds of thousands of new novels published every year, and I just can’t read all of them.” Matt Kirschenbaum says this demonstrates a deplorable lack of initiative in our younger scholars, and he’s probably right. But is my count reasonable? I pretty much made it up, so I thought I should check.

But how do you do that? Google could probably tell you how many volumes are in their metadata database, along with their years of publication, but how many of those are novels or other works of prose fiction? Wikipedia claims to know the totals for “books” broken down by country, though their numbers are oldish and taken from diverse sources.

If we can live with U.S.-only numbers, and if we’re mostly interested in English-language fiction, we can consult R.R. Bowker’s publishing statistics (they’re the people who run Books in Print). From them we learn that there were 407,000 books published in 2007 (the last year for which final numbers are available), a total that includes 123,000 “on-demand, short run, and other unclassified” titles. Of the 274,000 classified titles, 43,000 are “fiction,” a category that includes “strictly adult novels (including graphic novels) and short story collections.” (There are separate categories for anthologies, literary criticism, poetry, drama, etc. Oh, and “adult” is opposed to “juvenile,” not a synonym for porn.) If the same ratio holds for the unclassified category, we’d have another 19,000 novel-like entries, for a total of 62,000.

The U.S. isn’t the only (predominately) English-language book market in the world, of course; Britain’s is about the same size, Canada and Australia are significant, and there are many English-language novels published elsewhere. But there’s also redundancy in some of the titles shared between markets, and a portion of the new titles are only new editions or bindings of previously-released texts. (As an aside, I wonder how many of the books published annually ever exist in more than one edition? I’d bet it’s a much smaller number than our scholarly experience with canonical-ish texts would suggest. I also wonder how many new U.S. titles are in languages other than English.) Accounting for all of those factors is more work than I want to do at the moment, though I’d love to hear what other people know about them.

In the meantime let’s assume, conservatively, that the global total is on the order of twice the U.S. number. In that case it seems pretty safe to say there are around 100,000 new English-language works of long-form prose fiction published globally each year. That’s a ballpark number, but I don’t see any reason to believe that it’s off by more than a factor of about two, and it’s certainly of the right order of magnitude. Conclusion: I can go on using my line about the number of books I’m not reading.

Allegory in Single Authors

I’ve been following up a suggestion from Jan Rybicki about discovering statistically distinguishing features of allegorical and non-allegorical writing by comparing individual works by single authors rather than (or preliminary to) large corpora. This has some downsides (I don’t expect it to be much good for detecting characteristic terms/lemmata, for instance, which will be dominated by the specific content of the individual texts), but it might be a useful quick and dirty way to get a better feel for where to direct my attention.

Results to come in the next week or so, but in the interim I’m interested in thoughts on especially useful pairings. What I’m looking for are pairs of works by an author, one of which is decidedly allegorical, the other of which is not. Some examples are below.

Note that there are practical constraints: I need books that are available in full-text electronic form, which rules out most things published after 1923. And I’d like to use works that are reasonably familiar, if only so other literary folks can evaluate for themselves whether or not I’ve classified them correctly. Roughly matching word counts couldn’t hurt, but aren’t terribly important, since I’m mostly looking at frequency-regularized Dunning log likelihoods (and because length itself might be a marker of allegoricalness, though I don’t expect to answer that question with so small a sample). The more of these pairs, the better, but the point is that this isn’t true corpus work, so I’m not feeling like I need hundreds (that’s for later!).

Some suggestions thus far:

Author	Allegorical	Nonallegorical
Alcott	Little Women (1868)	Work (1873)
Bunyan	Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)	Grace Abounding (1666)
Defoe	Robinson Crusoe (1719)	Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
	Moll Flanders (1722)
Dickens	Christmas Carol (1843)	Bleak House (1853)
		Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)
Eliot	Adam Bede (1859)	Middlemarch (1871)
	Silas Marner (1861)	Mill on the Floss (1860)
Melville	Confidence Man (1857)	Israel Potter (1856)
	Moby-Dick (1851)
Orwell*	Animal Farm (1945)	Burmese Days (1934)
	1984 (1949)	Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
Shelley	Frankenstein (1818)	Mathilda (1819)

* God bless wonky Australian copyright

A couple of comments: There’s a regrettable skew toward the middle of the nineteenth century here, but my sample will probably always be nineteenth-century rich due to both the historical development of novel writing and the realities of copyright law.

Poetry would be an interesting addition. I’m not sure to what extent the vagaries of rhyme, meter, etc. would impact the comparisons, but I’d like to find out. So … what should I use over against Paradise Lost, for instance? Also, did Bunyan ever write something non-allegorical? (I can’t think of anything.) (Grace Abounding; thanks to Suzanne Keen, by way of the narrative list.) What about Langland? (Ditto, no hope.)

I’d like to have decent national and gender balance, which seems OK in the tiny sample I’ve given here. More variety would always be better.

I’ve tried to avoid overt Bildungsromane, on the theory that they’re always at least a little allegorical, even when they’re not. Alcott’s the exception because, you know, Little Women.

Thoughts and suggestions for changes, deletions, or insertions?

Followups on the GBS Settlement

There have been some very smart comments on (and around) my previous post on the Google Book Search settlement. If you’re interested, you might want to see the comments section of that post, plus two good posts by Eric Kansa, one before and one after the recent GBS conference at Berkeley.

Most of my thoughts on the points Eric and others raise appear in the comments section of my last post (linked above). But I think maybe the gut-level difference is related to this passage from Eric’s second post:

The Google Books corpus is unique and not likely to be replicated (especially because of the risk of future lawsuits around orphan-works). This gives Google exclusive control over an unrivaled information source that no competitor can ever approximate.

If Eric’s right about this, then it’s critical to get as much public access as possible built into the settlement now, because we won’t have another shot at it. For reasons laid out in my previous post, though, I’m less pessimistic about the prospects for future competition. I think the settlement will make it easier for others to enter this space by providing both a template for negotiations with the authors and publishers and a strong antitrust incentive for the rightsholders to grant equal access.

Scanning is a big-ish project, no doubt, but not prohibitively so (witness the Open Content Alliance, as well as Microsoft’s former efforts, stopped more by fear of legal action than by lack of funds). This is especially true if it turns out there’s significant money to be made by doing it (and the objection, after all, is that the scanned corpus is an immensely valuable resource on which Google will be sitting). Plus, scanning will only get cheaper with time.

My own ideal case would be a combination of meaningful copyright reform (to clarify that scanning for indexical use doesn’t require permission from a rightsholder) and something like Dan Cohen’s proposal for a government (or Ivy League) -funded book-scanning “moon shot” to benefit society at large. Barring this (extremely unlikely, I think) outcome, by all means, let there be as many public-friendly provisions tacked onto the GBS settlement as possible. My point, though, is that even as it stands now, the settlement provides enough benefits to enough people that I’d rather have it go forward than not, and I’m optimistic that many of its shortcomings can and will be addressed (by competition, by legislation, by technological advances) in the short to medium term.

The alternative, just to be clear, is really bad: maybe no book search at all, from anyone (thanks to the unresolved legal questions), and certainly no search of anything outside the (fossilized) public domain. No research corpus. No free public terminals with millions of in-copyright books at libraries. And this situation would endure indefinitely, backed up by the very real example of a messy, expensive, status-quo-reinforcing failure.

Google and EPUBs

Google just announced that they’re making a million+ public-domain books downloadable in EPUB format. This is an improvement over the old situation, where you could download PDFs (sans OCRed text) of those books or read them in plain text online (one physical page at a time), but not download a small, well-OCRed text copy.

I’d be delighted if they went all the way to true plain text downloads. (And then let me download all the public-domain stuff in bulk. And gave me a pony.) But this is a nice improvement. In other news, I’d also be delighted if my Kindle supported EPUB natively.

Victorians! Science! Semantic Indexing!

I had a very pleasant talk yesterday with Devin Griffiths, a late-stage grad student at Rutgers. (Thanks to Martin Mueller for putting us in touch.) Devin’s working on some cool LSA techniques to extract information about analogies from Darwin’s Origin and other nineteenth-century texts. He’s just started a blog to track his work and put up code. If you’re interested, check it out.

Supplemental Readings: Contemporary Edition

This semester’s “Contemporary U.S. Novel” syllabus has six primary texts:

• David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996, 1104 pp.)
• Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (1998, 576 pp.)
• Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days (2001, 389 pp.)
• Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005, 368 pp.)
• Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007, 352 pp.)
• Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances (2008, 256 pp.)

Six texts aren’t a whole lot to cover a decade, especially when there’s no consensus concerning what’s important. If you’re one of my students and you’re looking for reading that will extend what we’re covering in class, here are some suggestions. All of these are texts that I considered putting on some version of the syllabus; not all of them are American and not all are from the last decade (but very few are more than twenty years old):

• Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
• J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
• Edwidge Danticat, Farming of Bones
• Don DeLillo, Falling Man
• Louise Erdrich, Tracks
• Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
• William Gaddis, Carpenter’s Gothic
• Dagoberto Gilb, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña
• Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land
• Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook
• David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
• Toni Morrison, Beloved and Song of Solomon and A Mercy
• Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice
• Marilynne Robinson, Home and Gilead
• Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
• Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children and Satanic Verses
• Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead
• John Edgar Wideman, Fanon and The Cattle Killing

Even this list is much too short, but it’ll point you in some interesting directions.

Why I’m in Favor of the Google Book Search Settlement

When Google announced their book-scanning project five years ago, most academics I talked to about it were pretty happy. These days a lot of that enthusiasm seems, if not to have disappeared, then at least to have been tempered by serious doubts. I share some of these, but on the whole the settlement is a profoundly good thing. I support it, and I hope my colleagues will, too.

About the settlement

First, two notes: One on the underlying legal issue and one on what’s at stake. The publishers and authors (via the AAP and the Authors Guild, respectively) sued Google for alleged “massive copyright infringement” shortly after Google began scanning books from several prominent libraries. The theory is that because Google makes a copy of every book they scan, they require the rightsholders’ permission to assemble their book search database. Google says the process is covered by the fair use exception in copyright law and is no different from their Web search business, which also copies texts in order to index them. How this would be decided in court is unknown, mostly because the legal definition of fair use is extremely and deliberately vague.

But it’s clear that Google has a lot more to loose than do the publishers and authors if the case were to go against them. If the publishers were to loose, Google could index their stuff without further permission. But it’s hard to see how they’d be hurt by that, since it would only help people find books and wouldn’t change the strong basic copyright protections they already enjoy. Google still wouldn’t be able to sell or give away in-copyright books, for instance. Google, on the other hand, could be destroyed if they were to loose. They’d be on the hook for God knows how much in damages, of course (willful infringement of copyright carries maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per instance). But—and this is much more important—because there’s no fundamental difference between the copyright protections for Web pages and those for books, a decision in favor of the publishers would effectively outlaw search as it currently exists. Would a court dare do that? I have no idea, but Google obviously took the threat seriously enough to settle rather than to fight, especially since Web search is everything to them, whereas books are a comparative hobby. I wish Google had chosen to go to trial, because I think (and hope) they would have won, thereby clarifying and solidifying fair use rights in computational contexts, but it’s neither my money nor my business that’s at stake, and I understand why they chose to settle.

This dispute about fair use is interesting in its own right, but it’s not in itself the main objection to the settlement from most of my academic friends. (Most academics, though certainly not all, are in favor of more liberal fair use rights, and would therefore usually side with Google on copyright issues.) They’re concerned instead about a missed opportunity for real reform, and about the perceived market power the settlement would grant to Google and the rightsholders. How so? Not over works that are already in the public domain; these are free to copy and redistribute already, and there’s nothing in the settlement that would (or could) change that. Anyone else could create a competing database of public domain works (see the Open Content Alliance, for instance). And it’s not about current books, whether in or out of print, which the rightsholders are free to dispose of as they wish—they can be bought, sold, and licensed according to the whims of the publishers and authors. Again, nothing in the settlement could possibly change this, since to do so would involve rewriting American copyright law. The issue, then, is over so-called “orphan” works, books for which an appropriate rightsholder cannot be established or contacted.

Here’s how things stand now with respect to orphan works: They’re simply off limits for anything beyond ordinary fair use. They can’t be reissued, corrected, or adapted. You can’t assign them in a college course, because no one can produce a new edition and you can’t make copies of your own or your library’s (rare) copy. You can’t use an orphan sound or video clip in a new song or film. And, absent a real answer to the fair use question raised by Google’s scanning project, you can’t include them in a search tool, because you can’t get a rightsholder’s approval to do so. It would be an exaggeration to say orphan works may as well not exist—they still do sit in libraries and archives—but they’re a lot less useful than either public domain or current works.

The settlement would establish a “rights registry,” a clearinghouse tasked with identifying and tracking rightsholders (if any) and copyright status for all books. As a practical matter, “all” would mean “those scanned by Google,” at least at first. Google would pay $34.5 million to establish this registry, which would then operate as a non-profit and work on behalf of rightsholders, distributing whatever funds it collects to the appropriate parties. In exchange for setting up this registry and paying a chunk of cash ($125 million in all), the publishers and authors drop their copyright infringement claims (so Google can go on scanning). Maybe more importantly, as far as my uncomfortable academic friends are concerned, Google gets the right to scan, process, and sell orphan works, even though their proper rightsholders can’t be determined, and they get indemnity from lawsuits if they make honest mistakes about the copyright status of a work (and sell it or offer it for free when they shouldn’t, for instance). Rightsholders can opt out of this arrangement at any time, though of course they’ll then lose the benefits of being available through Google.

Some objections

This all looks pretty win-win. Google gets to do what they do, maybe opening up a big new market in the process, and they remove a significant legal cloud hanging over them. Publishers and authors get a pile of cash, a new outlet for their goods, and they get to sell a bunch of old stuff that’s currently out of print. Users win because they get a search and information resource that they wouldn’t otherwise have had.

The concern, though, is that Google is the only would-be scanner to benefit directly from the settlement. The settlement leaves unanswered the fair use question about book scanning. It leaves unchanged the status of orphan works, but allows Google alone (at least at first) to make use of them. And it gives two private, for-profit entities (the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers) control over the rights registry.

Wouldn’t it be better, these friends of mine say, to resolve these issues legislatively, so that the law would be clear and everyone would stand of level ground? Couldn’t we create a limited right to use orphan works, to store “non-consumptive” copies of texts for computational use, and set up a public rights registry? Wouldn’t that provide better and fairer competition in the marketplace? Absent those changes, don’t we risk creating a situation in which there are only two (cooperating) players (Google and the rightsholders) in the marketplace? Would any other company be able to negotiate an equivalent agreement with the rightsholders? Especially since those rightsholders wouldn’t have any incentive to help set up a competitive market for their products? Would any other company have the resources to scan millions of books, especially after Google has a head start on both the technical and the business sides? Isn’t this our one big chance to get scanning done right? Aren’t we missing a great opportunity to reform a badly out-of-whack U.S. copyright regime? And won’t libraries be almost required by their patrons to subscribe to Google’s digital products, available at only monopoly prices?

My answers

I share many of these concerns. But I still think we’ll be much, much better off with the settlement than without it. Here’s why:

Copyright reform

We do need copyright reform, including provisions for orphan works. But I don’t think we’ll ever get it, especially in the absence of the settlement. When has Congress ever scaled back any part of copyright protection? Is there any reason to think it will do so now or in the foreseeable future? Even if it were to, how long do you think we’ll have to wait for it, given our current political priorities, making no progress on things like book search and computational analysis rights in the interim?

Our current copyright regime—which allows for effectively endless copyright protection without any provision for an evolving public domain—is totally out of alignment with the social cost/benefit analysis that authorizes U.S. copyright law. I don’t think there’s any chance that’s going to change, but if the settlement is approved, there will at least be large, powerful, monied interests (cf. Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo, all of which recently [re-]joined the Open Content Alliance) lobbying to create specific provisions relaxing aspects of copyright control like those affecting orphan works and computational use. This differs from the current situation in which all the money and influence is on the other side. And they’ll have a legislator-friendly argument, namely that they’re just trying to compete in the marketplace on terms equal to Google’s. So far, they haven’t had to make this push, because no one has been making much money there. The settlement will change those incentives.

[Note in passing that the Berne Convention is always going to pose problems, since it's built around absurdly strong European-style ("moral") copyright provisions that prohibit things like registration requirements. The U.S. has never, of course, been especially keen on international agreements, but copyright protection is one of its long-standing hobby horses. It seems unlikely that the U.S. government would push for serious changes to Berne.]

An open market

There’s no reason to believe other entities won’t be able to enter the marketplace. The settlement provides only non-exclusive licenses to Google, and will serve as a ready-made template for a legal agreement between the rightsholders and any future scanners. Moreover, there would surely be serious antitrust scrutiny if the rightsholders were to withhold similar terms from others who wanted to enter the market. And why would they, really? More outlets means more differentiated products and more opportunities to sell their goods. Plus, with the registry already in place and both scanning and storage getting cheaper by the day, the barriers to entry are falling with time, not rising.

The status quo

What’s the alternative? If the settlement isn’t approved, no one can go ahead with any scanning projects. Not even those limited to the public domain (which, as noted, is less relevant by the day, because nothing new will ever fall into it); it would only take one mistaken scan of a protected work to expose a scanner to bankrupting litigation. Our current copyright system, written exclusively for content creators without even a nod to the public interest, will go on unchanged. And the public, academics and normal people alike, will have lost a terrifically promising resource, one assembled at significant cost and risk (if not with strictly altruistic motives) by a private company at almost no expense to us.

Library costs

Finally, libraries will, as always, have a choice to make about how they spend their subscription money, including whether or not to buy extended access to Google’s offerings. But they’ll already have free access (albeit at a single “terminal,” whatever that will mean in practice) to all of Google’s digital holdings. If prices are too high and they choose not to subscribe, they’ll still be better off than they were to begin with, since they’ll have one terminal with millions of in-copyright books, rather than none, as they do now. And how different is this situation from the one that holds with respect to commercial presses and journal publishers? Those publishers are already effective monopolies, and no one (alas!) seems to be suggesting legislation to change that fact. Do you think Google will be better or worse? How much do you pay for Google’s services now? Plus, if I’m right and other companies or not-for-profits enter the market, any monopoly concern disappears.

Summary

My argument here isn’t so different from the one progressives are now making about health care reform: The current situation is really, really bad. This plan makes things a lot better, with minimal downsides. I’d like real copyright reform as much as I’d like single-payer healthcare, but I think they’re about equally likely. So let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Now, there’s a chance that a defeat for the settlement would be galvanizing in its own way, and that it would give rise to serious copyright reform. My own feeling is that if Eldred v. Ashcroft didn’t do it, nothing will. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d much rather have Google Book Search and all it entails, plus the settlement-provided computational research corpus, a useful and well-funded rights registry (a significant public good), the plausible prospect of a thriving marketplace for digital texts and products based on them, and the first ever relaxation of at least a few copyright protections, than torpedo the settlement in hope of getting a marginally better legislative result that’s a huge longshot.

Reading with Machines

I just put up a longish post over at Early Modern Online Bibliography called “Reading with Machines.” It’s a highly selective and impressionistic overview of literary DH work, plus a bunch of links to relevant articles/sites/blogs/etc. Might be of interest to some; I may revise it at some point for inclusion here.

There are Parallels and there are Parallels

Finally, my answer to the first of the questions I posed about Disgrace. I’m answering it last because it’s the most important and because the solution depends on the positions one has taken on the others.

Question 1

• What is the relationship between the two rapes?

Short answer: As a moral matter, they are unrelated. It is tempting to read them otherwise, but to do so produces unworkable interpretations of the novel as a whole.

It’s probably necessary to begin by affirming that there are indeed two rapes in the novel. Lucy’s is straightforward (that is, the fact that Lucy has been raped is never in dispute), but I’ve sometimes been asked (by colleagues and students alike) about Melanie’s, whether it’s altogether appropriate to call her treatment by Lurie rape. I believe it is, and that this isn’t a hard call. The problem, such as it is, is that the only account we have is Lurie’s own, from the much quoted passage in which he refers to his second sexual encounter with Melanie as “not rape, not quite that” (25). A fine distinction, coming from the perpetrator. But Melanie has already said no to his “words heavy as clubs” that “thud into the delicate whorl of her ear,” and she has struggled in his grasp (24–25). Once it is clear that “nothing will stop him,” she “does not resist [further]. All she does is avert herself … As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck” (25). The language here is plain in its associations. There is also Lurie’s own acknowledgment that what he does to Melanie is “undesired to the core” (25). All this added to the necessarily unequal relationship that exists between them as teacher and student. One could go on, but this is surely enough. It is rape. The circumstances are different from Lucy’s, but that doesn’t change the nature of the crime in question, which is not simply “mistreatment” or “harassment.” (The latter terms are technically appropriate to the limited content of the inquiry, but not to the totally of Lurie’s actions.)

So, two rapes. Are they related? At a first level, no. The victims are different, the perpetrators are different, the circumstances are different, the associations are different. Lurie is involved, one way or another, in both, but not in a simple reversal as perpetrator and then as victim, which eliminates one potential point of direct continuity between them. At a second level, though, they obviously have something to do with one another. Lurie commits a rape that he is not inclined to see as an especially egregious crime. Later, he experiences at (nearly) first hand the trauma of rape and becomes its second-order victim (he is not raped, but his daughter is), after which (simplifying greatly) he expresses views about justice and punishment that are at odds with his earlier positions.

The second level, in which there is obviously some sort of connection between the rapes, raises questions that range in difficulty from “tricky” to “oh sweet Jesus.” Has Lurie reformed, having seen the error of his ways? Does the second rape offset the first? Which rape is worse? On what basis can one compare crimes in general and rapes in particular? How does sexual violation compare to other kinds of violation or loss or suffering? To what extent do historical and social factors mitigate or aggravate the seriousness of different crimes?

This is the stuff of philosophy and law. With respect to Coetzee’s novel, the answers will be terrifically complex and highly fraught. I, for one, don’t especially want to take them on in their full form, especially absent strong guidance from the text. But must we answer them? Well, we must if we think that Lucy’s rape serves as either a punishment for David’s crimes—be they literal or historical—or a commentary on their true nature. Why is that? Because punishment, as we often understand it, is supposed to fit the crime it redresses; if David suffers too much or too little as a result of Lucy’s rape, and if that rape serves as his punishment for raping Melanie, then his punishment will have been inappropriate. If Lurie in turn serves as a figure for South Africa’s privileged white minority, and if his crime stands in for his community’s historical abuses (both of which figurations I think are well supported in the text), then the novel’s position on the appropriateness of his punishment is critically important, assuming we do indeed see this as a matter of punishment.

The key here is that our usual concept of punishment is strongly related to our understanding of debt. See this post for a more complete argument, but the idea is that punishment is intended to extract from the perpetrator of a crime a loss equivalent to that imposed on the victim by the crime itself (plus an extra margin for deterrence). I think this is an imperfect but reasonable and ethical way to organize the law, though I don’t envy the task of equivalence-setting it imposes on legislators and judges. But is this really what Disgrace is up to, trying to figure out exactly how much a rapist should pay (in the currency of suffering) for his sins, or how much a privileged ethnic group should rightly expect to suffer at the hands of those it has wronged? And if so, what’s the answer? Does a beating, a grand theft auto, and the brutal rape of one’s daughter offset a milder rape one has committed oneself? (Incidentally, I use “milder” here in the sense of “a milder beating”; the comparison is obviously not to be confused with “mild” tout court.) Who among the current inheritors of racial exploitation must pay how much in the compensation of what suffering to whom?

These aren’t altogether absurd questions to ask of the novel, but I think Coetzee’s answer is something other than a straightforward position on the appropriate contours of compensation. Instead, the book says in effect “Who knows? As a practical, political, legal question, we’ll need to find a practical, political, legal answer, probably one that accounts for expediency as well as strict justice. This is important, but it’s not my concern (witness the obvious difficulties and unresolved tensions of the inquiry/TRC section). My concern is moral, about the ways in which one atones for one’s sins, if such a thing is possible.”

I think this question, about atonement, is the real core of the novel. And I think the answer is that as far as morality is concerned, debt doesn’t work as a model for atonement; you don’t repay your sins by suffering for them. The novel makes this point largely negatively, by showing the problems in which we become embroiled if we try to behave otherwise. Specifically, we end up needing to answer questions like the ones above; we need to say whether or not Lurie’s suffering is equivalent to Melanie’s, and whether Lucy’s is equal to those of apartheid’s victims. The book suggests that to do so in any strict sense is either impossible or objectionable, since it resembles much too closely a calculus of two (incalculable) wrongs making a right.

This leads us, finally, to a third view of the relationship between the rapes, which is that, so far as the book is concerned, they simply exist as brute facts in moral isolation. Their juxtaposition is an occasion for reflection, maybe even a prompt to ethical action, but they’re not meant to be weighed against one another. You can’t undo your sins, except to the extent that you can make your victims whole. If you can’t do that—and it’s not at all clear that one ever could, certainly not in the present case—your sins simply go on and on. You may well be more sinned against than sinning, but that’s not the point, since the relevant question doesn’t concern the balance of your moral accounts. The best you can do is to sin less (and less egregiously) in the first place and sin less in he future.

So that leaves us with Lurie as a sinful man, unredeemed and unredeemable. This was the point of many of my earlier thoughts about his actions; time and again, we’re presented with things that might be understood as redemptive, or at least as opportunities for redemption. And time and again they don’t pan out. This isn’t conditional; it’s required, the novel argues, by the nature of moral transgression itself.

This feels a little sketchy, but this post is already too long and I’ve gone on at some length about it elsewhere (see especially the paper linked from that post). One last thought, though. I promised to say something about the perfective (by which Lurie is seemingly fascinated), so here it is: We’re meant to understand many of the events in the second half of the novel as culminations of processes set afoot in the first. Lucy’s rape is the apotheosis of David’s sexual violence, its appalling perfection. David’s final abandonment of the dog is the perfection of his disgrace and destitution. The attack itself is the culmination of colonial exploitation, its necessary conclusion. The situation as a whole is one of finality, completion, the end of things (or, better, the end of a personal and historical situation) … perfection in the grammatical sense. And yet even these actions carried to perfection—to their retributive, debasing endpoint—don’t undo the sins that occasioned them. If that’s the case, then it’s hard to sustain the idea of atonement by (even perfect) sacrifice.

On Lucy’s Response to the Attack

Answers to two more of the basic questions about Disgrace, this time concerning Lucy’s reaction to her rape.

Questions 2 & 3

• Why does Lucy refuse to report her rape or otherwise pursue legal remedy for it?
• Why does Lucy remain on the farm after the attack?

Short answer to both: Because Lucy represents one, abnegatory pole of the novel’s imagined range of potential responses to guilt.

These questions are tricky, they’re related, and they’re absolutely central to making sense of the novel. Lucy offers several iterations of her thinking on both matters, always in conversation (of a sort) with Lurie. So we have her words, presented in direct dialogue, plus Lurie’s own speculation, both put directly to her and contemplated on his own.

Lucy’s words first. Immediately after the attack, she asks David “would you mind keeping to your own story, to what happened to you?” “You tell what happened to you,” she continues, “I tell what happened to me” (99). So from the beginning (minutes or hours after the attack), not only are their stories separable, but they are individual, personal. This is important, because it’s the basis of Lucy’s later claim that what happened to her isn’t properly public. “As far as I am concerned,” she says the next day, “what happened to me is a purely private matter” (112). This is true, according to Lucy, not because rape is always so, but owing to the historical contingencies of her situation:

“In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, at this time, it is not. It is my business, mine alone.”

“This place being what?”

“This place being South Africa.” (212)

Later still, however, Lucy confesses—in her only unprompted discussion of the attack with David—that she was baffled and shaken by exactly the personal investment of her attackers:

It was done with such personal hatred. That was what stunned me more than anything. The rest was … expected. But why did they hate me so? I had never set eyes on them. (156, ellipses in original)

It is in response to this question, in an attempt at palliation, that Lurie offers his much-quoted hypothesis that “it was history speaking through them … it may have seemed personal, but it wasn’t” (156).

The distinction here between personal and historical motives matters because it bears directly on Lucy’s reasons for not pressing charges and for staying on the farm. The problem, though, is that the public and private aspects of the attack and of her response to it are inseparable; Lurie is right that the attackers are motivated by impersonal forces, but that doesn’t preclude a deeply personal cathexis on Lucy as the specific object through or in which those forces find expression. So the attack is both personal, which means that these specific men remain a threat to Lucy, and impersonal, which means that apprehending them will do nothing to remove the general threat under which she lives.

That’s the attackers’ side of the equation; on Lucy’s, the problem is no simpler. As she says, what happened to her is personal; she has the right to respond to it as she sees fit and is under no obligation to treat it as a public matter (or, by the same token, as a private one). Moreover, what happened to her did not happen to David, except in the much different sense that his child was raped (an important point when we finally turn to the relationship between the novel’s rapes). But of course Lucy is aware that the attack was also fundamentally impersonal (that is, political) and that her response to it, whatever it might be, cannot but be public and political. She seems determined nevertheless to come as close as possible to removing herself from the public sphere, aware as she is of the reality that to press charges is to enter into a national phenomenon and debate concerning black-on-white violence. But it’s not as though simply accepting the situation avoids an entanglement with those same politics. That’s what she means when she says that what happened to her is a purely private matter: she can only treat it as private, else the consequences to her ethical and political self-image will be disastrous. “I must make the political decision,” she is saying, “to treat this as a nonpolitical matter.”

So that’s why she doesn’t press charges, because it is (to her) the least objectionable political response to an act that, under the circumstances, can only be construed politically.

Note that this addresses, at least in part, two of Lurie’s speculations about Lucy’s motives (see pp. 112 and 156). She doesn’t believe that by failing to press charges she will be spared further attacks, so hers is not an attempt to buy individual peace or reconciliation at the price of rape. I’m not so sure, though, that Lurie’s second guess—that she is trying to work out “some form of private salvation” (112)—misses the mark entirely. In the crudely psychologizing sense, yes, that’s wrong; she doesn’t want to suffer, and therefore doesn’t see the attack as a welcome opportunity for salvation. But in a political and moral sense, Lucy takes seriously the suggestion that she specifically and whites generally owe a historical debt to those who suffered under a social system that favored (and in a way continues to favor) people like her. “What if [another attack] is the price one has to pay for staying on? … Why should I be allowed to live here without paying?” (158), she muses. “Subjection. Subjugation,” she calls it, the new arrangement under which she is prepared to live (159).

Is this salvation? Probably not, and Lucy herself rejects the term as inappropriately religious. Still, she is plainly trying to work out an ethical sense of her obligations, ones that, as she acknowledges, are more (but not entirely) collective than individual.

This is then also the beginning of the answer to the second question, about why she stays on following the attack. Following the logic above, the problem is that she has not yet adequately atoned for her sins, not yet paid off her historical debt. So although she will likely be attacked again (or else give up to Petrus all she possesses in return for protection), that is what she understands to be demanded of her. This is at once absurd and obviously correct. Absurd because her suffering is so clearly out of proportion to her individual debt, particularly to these three men (whom she has “never seen before”—I suppose one could do something with the optics of power here, though I’m not so inclined). If she must expect, justly, to be raped, then nothing is prohibited in the aftermath of apartheid. But it’s also obviously correct if we accept the hypothesis that she is merely an object through which historical wrong begins to find redress; there is nothing she can give and nothing she can suffer that can possibly offset the wrongs of apartheid, which are very plainly greater than what can be undergone by any one person. If it is Lucy’s ethical obligation to compensate those victimized by her race, then she must be prepared to pay endlessly.

This is an unattractive conclusion, and I certainly don’t think it’s Coetzee’s, but I do think it’s one that the novel presents and works through, and I think it’s something that Lurie also confronts. (It would be worth thinking in particular about Life and Times of Michael K. in connection with this point, a novel that I think is underaddressed in studies of Disgrace.) My position is that Lucy is mistaken concerning the nature of her obligation, largely because she’s wrong about the metaphor of debt and repayment (see two earlier posts on ethics and debt, “Disgrace and Debt” and “Debt and Punishment“). But if she’s wrong, the error is hardly hers alone; it’s deeply embedded (rightly, perhaps) in our thinking about law and punishment. The novel’s suggestion, however, is that it’s misplaced in the case of moral transgression and obligation (again, see those earlier posts for the details of this argument).

There is also one further explanation of Lucy’s decision to stay on, one that’s closer to her own direct claims, namely that she has kind of blind, unreflective compulsion to carry on carrying on. “Guilt and salvation are abstractions. I don’t think in those terms,” she says (112). Later she writes (to Lurie) “I am a dead person and I do not know yet what will bring me back to life. All I know is that I cannot go away” (161). Both of these declarations mirror her claim, the day after the attack, that although Lurie sees returning to the farm as “a bad idea … not safe,” “it was never safe, and it’s not an idea, good or bad. I’m not going back for the sake of an idea. I’m just going back” (105).

There’s a certain modified sense of existentialist ethics here insofar as Lucy remains committed to a kind of cause, but it is absent the important component of a meaningful decision or any guarantee that the course itself is a laudable one. And that’s a significant “but.” In fact it’s this blind drive that makes Lucy serve more as a totem for, or principle of, atonement without limit than as a full ethical actor in her own right. If there’s a full-fledged individual ethical figure in the novel—and I’m not at all convinced there is—it will therefore have to be Lurie or no one.

That’s it for questions two and three. One to go, the most difficult of all.