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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 Zoë 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

Though these two men are worlds apart, neither fits into the New South Africa. Both end up disgraced and defeated — David Dirkse, the revolutionary hero, dead by his own hand. My focus, however, will not be on these two male protagonists; instead, I will focus on particular women in their stories while trying at the same time to address some absences, gaps, and displacements in the texts they inhabit. Both novels are centrally about dramas of race and the violation of women. The intersection of race and gender is of course always fraught with tension, yet gender seems to carry a disproportionately heavy burden in these novels. In Disgrace, in particular, one must suspect that gender is at least to some extent displacing another identity category that cannot easily be named. When I found myself mistyping the title of the novel as Disrace, what was missing suddenly became clear: the novel is dis-raced—it is uncomfortable with naming racial categories or discussing racial issues. David Lurie is losing the power and privilege he is accustomed to, but instead of pointing to the new racial order he fixates on questions of gender and sexuality. For instance, he refers oddly to the Cape Technical University where he teaches as `this transformed and, to his mind, emasculated institution of learning' (4) [emphasis added]. Perhaps he is squeamish about the impoliteness of naming race; perhaps racial and gendered power are so intertwined in his mind that he genuinely conflates them. In both novels, there is a tension between testimony and silence, truth-telling and secrecy, the private and the public.

Unspeakable Injuries in Disgrace and David's Story