David and the Countervoices. Focalization, Subject, and Ethics in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

According to J. M. Coetzee, “[t]here is a true sense in which writing is dialogic: a matter of awakening the countervoices in oneself and embarking upon speech with them. It is some measure of a writer’s seriousness whether he does evoke/invoke those countervoices in himself, that is, step down from the position of what Lacan calls ‘the subject supposed to know’” (“Interview”, Doubling the Point. Essays and interviews, edited by David Attwell, Harvard UP, 1992, pp. 57–68: 65). In his novel Disgrace (1999), this possibility and the ethical issues that it raises take narrative form in the story of David Lurie and the other characters, inviting the reader, also due to the novel’s narrative devices, to what Gayatry Spivak called “counterfocalization” (Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak, Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching, «Diacritics», vol. 32, n. 3-4, 2002, pp. 17-31: 22). Moving between narratology and ethics, we will observe these aspects of Coetzee’s novel and discuss, in a wider perspective, about the moral sense of literature.