Disgrace novel ideas
Lecture 1: A man with no connection or responsibility who goes down a rabbit hole of moral dissolution, pride, and defiance
Chapter 1 we have a man who has given up to connection, meaning, and responsibility, and has instead opted for medicating his loneliness and nihilism and self-pity with sensuous consumer experiences, just enough to keep him afloat.
He has no self-awareness. He doesn’t see that he has become a predator and possibly a rapist.
He doesn’t see his own moral dissolution. Rather, he sees the world outside him as disintegrating and for being the fault of his woes.
He doesn’t see his addictive behavior, how when his prostitute disappears he must replace her with another consumer experience.
He doesn’t see his creepy, irrational behavior except in glimpses, but he appears to suppress any self-awareness, as he must feed the predatory beast.
You might discuss Nietzsche’s Last Man
Lecture 2: Butt handed to him on a stick
We almost have to wonder if David Lurie has an unconscious wish to sabotage his career, that to die is to be reborn.
Or perhaps we are being too generous.
In life, we don’t change on a substantive and radical level until we’ve had our butt handed to us on a stick.
Whether we induce this process or it happens to us as a result of our reckless behavior, some of us are eviscerated, humiliated, disgraced, and force to rebuild our lives on a radically different premise than the life we used to have.
The events that precede the infamous Chapter 6 seem reckless and suggest a Death Wish or Thanatos.
On an unconscious level, many addicts wish to die or “get caught” because their unconscious knows their habits are not sustainable.
There must be a self-loathing in Lurie.
We also see a man who worships Eros as an abstraction and as a literary artifice but dehumanizes people with his lack of empathy. He has thrown away the value of literature and philosophy.
Lecture 3: The meaning of confession and a plea in the theater of repentance.
Chapter 6 has enough material for its own lecture.
We could discuss the moral ambivalence of the chapter and why Lurie needs to repent but cannot do so in the circumstances presented him.
Lecture 4. Lurie’s focus from his suffering shifts to the suffering of the world: Weltschmerz.
The novel’s critique shifts from an excoriation of David’s moral depravity to the world’s.
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