From the opening pages of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, a novel about a South African literature professor whose career is ruined after he has an affair with a student:

Wine, music: a ritual that men and women play out with each other. Nothing wrong with rituals, they were invented to ease the awkward passages. But the girl he has brought home is not just thirty years his junior: she is a student, his student, under his tutelage. No matter what passes between them now, they will have to meet again as teacher and pupil. Is he prepared for that?

'Are you enjoying the course?' he asks.

'I liked Blake. The Wonderhorn stuff.'

'Wunderhorn.'

'I'm not so crazy about Wordsworth.'

'You shouldn't be saying that to me. Wordsworth has been one of my masters.'

It is true. For as long as he can remember, the harmonies of The Prelude have echoed within him.

'Maybe by the end of the course I'll appreciate him more. Maybe he'll grow on me.'

'Maybe. But in my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.'

Like falling in love. Do the young still fall in love,or is that mechanism obsolete by now, unnecessary, quaint, like steam locomotion? He is out of touch, out of date. Falling in love could have fallen out of fashion and come back again half a dozen times, for all he knows.

'Do you write poetry yourself?' he asks.

'I did when I was at school. I wasn't very good. I haven't got the time now.'

'And passions? Do you have any literary passions?'

She frowns at the strange word. 'We did Adrienne Rich and Toni Morrison in my second year. And Alice Walker. I got pretty involved. But I wouldn't call it a passion, exactly.'

So: not a creature of passion. In the most roundabout of ways, is she warning him off?

Across the rim of the cup she regards him steadily. 'Why?'

'Because you ought to.'

'Why ought I to?'

'Why? Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.'

His hand still rests against her cheek. She does not withdraw, but does not yield either.

'And what if I already share it?' In her voice there is a hint of breathlessness. Exciting, always, to be courted: exciting, pleasurable.

'Then you should share it more widely.'

Smooth words, as old as seduction itself. Yet at this moment he believes in them. She does not own herself. Beauty does not own itself.

'From fairest creatures we desire increase,' he says, 'that therefore beauty's rose might never die.'

Not a good move. Her smile loses its playful, mobile quality. The pentameter, whose cadence once served so well to oil the serpent's words, now only estranges. He has become a teacher again, man of the book, guardian of the culture-hoard. She puts down her cup. 'I must leave, I'm expected.'

The clouds have cleared, the stars are shining. 'A lovely night,' he says, unlocking the garden gate. She does not look up. 'Shall I walk you home?'

'No.'

'Very well. Good night.' He reaches out, enfolds her. For a moment he can feel her little breasts against him. The she slips his embrace and is gone.

Even more remarkable is the manner in which this scene from Coetzee's 1999 novel anticipates the story with which feminist at large Naomi Wolf recently regaled the world about an encounter she had with Yale literature professor Harold Bloom some twenty years ago. Wolf was doing an independent study with Bloom; she invited him to her home for a candlelit, wine-soaked meal that was to be a prelude to discussing her poetry. But instead of discussing her work, Bloom made a pass at Wolf, a traumatic event from which, apparently, she has yet to recover. The student in Disgrace does eventually sleep with the professor, and also eventually files harassment charges against him. Wolf turned Bloom down, but is belatedly using the media to accuse him of being a serial harasser. One wonders whether Wolf is a reader of Coetzee (the professor in the novel is roundly punished for his sins), whether the student in the novel would have spent the night if instead of quoting Shakespeare the professor had said "You have the aura of election about you," whether Wolf would not have vomited in the sink if Bloom had tried to seduced her by whispering sweet pentameter, preferably her own, in her eager, willing ear.

Women are strange critters. They love fashion. The current fashion among literary, intellectual women is to lure men into romantic musings in order to capture them and deliver them to the police. It's so dramatic. In Woodstock, where I have a summer home, a successful snaring of an "abuser" can make you the hit of local parties for the entire season.

I predict this. Within ten years, the fashion will have reversed itself. 35 years ago, when I was an undergraduate, the fashion was completely opposite.

Although this stuff seems serious, it is not. (Well, it is serious in that men's lives and careers get destroyed. But, hey, who cares about that? This is, in fact, another statement of the traditional role of men as sacrificial totems, re Jesus Christ. It's what we're supposed to do.)

The purpose of this is to place women in dramatic settings in which they get to play the dramatic heroine. Men, once you realize that this is a B grade movie that the literary, intellectual dames enjoy, and in which you have a predetermined bit part, you can move on. That is, move on to dames who are playing the game straight. In other words, an honest woman.

"Disgrace is ... weak ... when it comes to explaining why an intelligent and canny middle-aged professor would chuck his livelihood, his reputation, and his self-respect for the sake of a roll in the hay with a coarse post-nymphet with whom he has nothing in common."

I don't know. Just from the very entertaining snippet you posted, it looks like his motive was pure aesthetics. Not her beauty, but the whole seduction scenario. It was theater he wanted to take part in. She had a different script.

Laura and I made the same comment from opposite sides of the aisle. Charming and correct.

For the gents out there, some advice... sonnets won't do it if you are after the young women. (I'm not, but I know the game.) Straightforward, mean dirty talk will work better. Don't exactly know why, but they love it. And they speak it, too.

Speaking from experience here. More brutal the better. That's the way they like to talk to me. Favorite opening line of the under 25 year olds when they try to seduce me and my wife... "I've got a bald eagle." or some varient on that theme. You figure it out. You will offend them with talk of romance.

Stephen
I think that shows a great deal of the problem that has resulted from the women's movement. Instead of the old civilizing role they previously played, young women have crawled down into the sewer with young men. I hope this latest generation will be happy there.

Stephen is right. I hear them talk to each other. The things I've heard from young women in the last few years would make a sailor blush.

In a way Coetzee *is* weak, if what is expected is rational explanation for why people enact the damage they do. But the professor's career suicide, as well as the long sequence that follows (where he goes to live with his estranged daughter in the country) are essentially inexplicable.

In Coetzee's novels there is this repeated motif: suicide which can never be explained to the rational, life-loving world. Others commit acts of violence too -- usually in the interest of some terrible ideological obsession.

The potentially ethical people retreat from the game. I used to admire this gesture in Coetzee, but now I begin to feel that it is overly romantic. As for Bloom, it's funny but I just wrote a blog entry about him earlier today (must be something in the air...).

Laura, your reference to scripts is compelling.
The professor's first mistake (imho) was having a script in the first place. Seems to me that romance (or lust) is a dish best served up ad lib. He clearly had an internal teleprompter set up and as a result his words came out sounding stilted and cold (an academic George Bush if you will to the extent that is not an oxymoron. :) - just kidding folks - before we get off on a political tangent!).

His second mistake was not going off script as soon as it became apparent, which was almost immediately, that his script was falling on deaf ears. Neverthless, he plowed on and as a result when it came time for him to recite his no doubt pre-scripted piece de resistance it made him seem to me as vacuous as his dinner companion.

Laura, I think you are correct, he was looking for theater - with dinner and dessert being Act I leading to a steamy Act II. She wasn't in the same theater even if she implicitly was amenable to the same Act II. Lastly, I cannot make blanket generalizations as to what women as a group want or like. Seems impossible to do so without quickly devolving into a host of competing stereotypes. I can only state the beauty of my relationships has been their individuality and their improvisational nature. I don't like scripts. I also have a strong preference for using my own words and not someone else's in these situations. They may not be as 'pretty' as Wordsworth or Shakespeare - but they are my own. As Amerdeep suggests, it is indeed a game, but one that I do enjoy and prefer not to retreat from.

"Lastly, I cannot make blanket generalizations as to what women as a group want or like." You're a smart man. Women are individuals who want different things. It's got to be off-putting to be quoted poetry to when you don't appreciate it; like you're a stand-in for some archetypal WOMAN and not a real person at all. But some women would want to be quoted poetry to. All women of 25 and under are not foul-mouthed sluts. I have a young woman of 17 in my household who definitely is not.

Of course, a woman who truly loves romantic poetry would be pretty ticked off if some cynical old man tried to use it to get into her pants.

I think Amardeep Singh has an interesting point in equating Coetzee's professor's behavior with inexplicable suicide. Haven't we all known people who seemed hell-bent, in the face of everything their friends and relatives tell them and in defiance of the most basic common sense? People whose parents died of lung cancer, who take up smoking? People who have trouble paying their bills, but go to casinos every week? I reckon it's human nature. That's always entertaining. It makes us feel virtuous to read about other peoples' frailties.

What's so hard to understand about men who, heedless of the consequences, want to have sex with nubile women?

It's not hard to understand that a man would want to have sex with an attractive woman. It's hard to understand why he would risk his career, that took many years to build, over sex with a student; particularly this student, who had no qualities other than youth, good looks, and availability to attract him.

I am reminded of a book I picked up a few years ago: Battling the Inner Dummy. The inner dummy is a way of explaining Freud's concept of the id. That's the part of one's personality that's kind of like a toddler: impulsive, wants what it wants, knows nothing of consequences. A person letting his inner dummy take control might lose his temper with a policeman, for example. Or blow a bunch of money at a casino when he can't pay his bills. Pres. Clinton's risky and foolish dalliance with Monica is used as an example in the book. It's an interesting read.

MS is quite right. I spent some time recently doing part-time substitute teaching in a decent suburban Detroit school system. I mentioned to my father, a Navy veteran, what I heard the girls say casually. It was enough to make a sailor blush.

I've had the misfortune to come across some of Naomi Wolf's writings. Apparently when it suits her she is a strong, "hear me roar" woman. And when it suits her, she's a frail and delicate flower.

A man would risk it all because he fears death. Also because in a given population the genes that scream out to respond to signals linked to reproductive behavior generally replace many of the genes that don't. And possibly they scream louder in some as they get older.

Why are people assuming that only men take risks for love and sex? Don't literature and experience teach us that women do, also?

Newspapers certainly do. Periodically, women teachers get caught having sexual relationships with middle school boys. It's icky to think that a woman would risk prison - not for sex, because any female can get that at a bar or streetcorner - but for sex with a kid. The child can do something for her emotionally that a man cannot, apparently. I'd have a lot more trouble envisioning that scenario as an entertaining novel.

David, thank you for stating what now seems obvious to me but which I had previously neglected to consider.

Anna Karenina seems to speak to your point.

Your post made me think about how we have come full circle (or is it a half circle?). A recurring theme of Anna Karenina and other similar works through the mid-20th century involves the post-affair misery of the "fallen woman".

Today there are no fallen women in literature or in society as far as I can see. In fact many celebs (Lewinsky, Heidi Fleiss,et al) enjoy no small measure of post-scadal fame and Thelma & Louisa-like cult status, not shame. We now have, two consecutive blogs from Erin (Mamet and Coetzee) involving fallen men and the shame that accompanies their ineitable downfall. I suppose the concept of the fallen man is au courant while the concept of the fallen woman is archaic and not viable frmo a marketing perspective.

But Anna Karenina's misery was mostly self-inflicted, wasn't it? I got the impression that turning her back on her vows was such a blow to her personal integrity that her personality (psyche, whatever you want to call it) suffered and ultimately fell apart. Losing her son had a lot to do with her unhappiness too, but she ignored her daughter; so much for thwarted maternal instinct. Sure, there were elements of society that turned their backs on her but she knew that would happen at the outset. And there were places where she and her lover lived, where they were not snubbed, his country house for example. She chose to go where she would be punished for what she had done. This story is worlds apart from the professors who just want to get some loving from some sweet young things and think no one will ever know. But perhaps you read AK differently.

As for the post-scandal fame of Lewinsky, I read some blurb once in which she complained that it was really hard to get a decent man to ask her out. No one she was interested in cared to be seen with her in public. Hopefully that's no longer the case.

I think this scene is only prolegomena to the point Coetzee wants to make about post-apartheid South Africa. The professor uses "western" ideas in his attempt to seduce the girl, and then stands on "principle" in his refusal to defend himself, as if he were Socrates. He styles himself a man of romance, driven by the irrational subterranean currents which his poets have celebrated, and we are sympathetic. But when his daughter, driven by similar ideas, chooses to marry her African rapist, our sympathy to the professor has left us crippled in our attempt to argue against her.

David R. makes a good point.

Additionally, supposedly intelligent people act unwisely all the time. Is it so hard to believe that this professor is continuing in that time-honored way?

David

It's not that it's hard to believe that they do it. We know they do. If the novel is just going to be about people randomly and pointlessly doing stupid things for no reason at all, no one is going to read that novel.

What about Iago?

Plenty of people read Othello. Yet there is little, if any, reason for Iago's malevolence.

The initial act of infatuation, carelessness, self-absorption (I think the prof was practicing a "vanity" seduction to see if he still "had it"), is an event with little, but not no motive.

As with Othello, what follows the initial, hard to explain act, is the story.

David

disgrace is a really beautiful book withallits compactness. the more i started disliking david, i started admiring coetzee, for his profound work. what is wrong with david? can we attribute it to his age?then, what has education done to him? how is he different from those who raped his daughter?education does make a human being better, in that case , how has eeducation helped david?only to justify his part in beautiful words as" servant of eros"

disgrace is a really beautiful book withallits compactness. the more i started disliking david, i started admiring coetzee, for his profound work. what is wrong with david? can we attribute it to his age?then, what has education done to him? how is he different from those who raped his daughter?education does make a human being better, in that case , how has eeducation helped david?only to justify his part in beautiful words as" servant of eros"