The Johnston Center for Integrative Studies

            Approximately two years ago, a library support group known as the Friends of Smiley Library, called a meeting of community members interested in forming collaborative reading groups.  A number of book clubs emerged as a result.  The Third Monday Book Club was one of these.  The members expressed an interest in eclectic readings including historical analysis, literature, and current events.  It has been a serendipitous and satisfying collaboration.  The members largely consist of a core of six retired or semi-retired individuals including a criminal law attorney (the facilitator), several teachers, a school librarian, a community cultural events coordinator, and an engineer.  Nearly all have been or continue to be prominently involved in community service, including serving on the local symphony board, coaching a high school mock trial team, establishing and overseeing large-scale tutorial program for elementary school children, and writing for the Constitutional Rights Foundation.  Three members have been honored as Women of Achievement by the University of Redlands.  The members appear to range from 60 something through approximately 80 years of age. 

            Some of the readings and discussions undertaken by the group in the past two years include:

            Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence,

            by A. J. Langguth,

            Hidden Iran by Ray Takeyh,

            The White Rock, an Exploration of the Inca Heartland by Hugh Thomson

            The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

            The Trial:  A History from Socrates to OJ Simpson by Sadakat Kadri

            The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig

            No god but God by Reza Aslan

            Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

            West with the Night by Beryl Markham

            The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night by Mark Haddon

            Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

            As book club facilitator, I received a request from Professor Bill McDonald, of the University of Redlands, to lead the group in a discussion of Coetzee’s Disgrace, and  report on the discussion.  This undertaking paralleled that of other individuals, academicians, students, and lay readers solicited by Professor McDonald.  The Club understood that Professor MacDonald was preparing a text on the teaching of the novel, and hoped to glean the reactions, perceptions, and insights into the book, from a variety of readers.

The session took place over the course of about an hour and a quarter.  Because I wished to capture the impressions of the readers without influencing their views, the discussion was open-ended. In preparation, I did some background reading about Coetzee and the book, and prepared an outline of possible areas of discussion.  The group was not held to the outline, however, and the session was relatively free flowing.  The following is a substantially accurate script of the discussion.

Joyce:  I found it very depressing.  I felt as though there was a big black cloud over my head as I read it.

Mary: Why didn’t this man shape up and get control of his life?

Carl:  I liked the book.  It was a page-turner for me. I know something about recent South African history.  This knowledge is helpful to understand the daughter and why she behaved as she did. At the beginning the book was not so interesting to me.  Lurie was a man in the throws of “male-o-pause”, having endured two divorces and several affairs.  Then, when he began living with his daughter and the ensuing events occurred, the book took an interesting turn. It was an insight into the new South Africa.

Stan:  Why did Lucy, the daughter, do what she did? It was inexplicable to me.

Carl:  To me she had adjusted to a new reality in South Africa, and it was a turning back to the mores of the black South Africans as represented by her neighbors, and as she wanted to remain on the farm, and she had to reject the western way of reacting to the rape.  Petrus was a relative of one of the perpetrators of the rape.

Mary: Yes, and the implication was that it could happen again.

Stan:   The theme seemed to be one of power.  Lurie has power over the prostitute because of money, dominance over the secretary because she’s a secretary, dominance over the student/victim, Melanie.  Now in South Africa power is turned upside-down.

Carl:  That theme of power is carried out further when Isaacs, the father of Melanie, tells Lurie that he (Lurie) had been on a pedestal, but “the mighty have fallen”.  This is a clue as to what will happen next politically. I assume the author is Afrikaner.  The Afrikaners went to South Africa, and in this sense had a close connection with the Jews who went to Israel, in a sort of Old Testament sense.  The Afrikaners looked upon South Africa as a Promised Land.  That God had given them this land.  The word “grace” is like a gift from God.  One of the meanings of “disgrace” for him was that God had taken the gift, or the grace from the Afrikaners, and now the submerged class and their mores are in the ascendancy.

I wondered who is the audience he is writing for? And I think it is less for the broader world, and more for the remaining white South Africans who remain there.

            Members of the group then asked for biographical information.  Jane read the following summary from the following website:  http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/coetzee.htm.

“J.M. Coetzee, a descendant from 17^th-century Dutch settlers, was born in Cape Town.  His father was a lawyer and his mother a schoolteacher.  In his memoir, boyhood (1997), Coetzee portrayed himself as a sickly, bookish boy, who adored his freedom-loving mother:  ‘I will not be a prisoner in this house, she says.  I will be free.’  At home Cotzee spoke English and with other relatives Afrikaans – his parents wanted to be English.  Coetzee studied both mathematics and literature at the University of Cape Town.  After graduating, he moved to England, where he worked as an applications programmer (1962-63) in London.  His evenings Coetzee spent in the British Museum, ‘reading Ford Madox Ford, and the rest of the time tramping the cold streets of London seeking the meaning of life.’ As he later said.  From London he moved to Bracknell, Berkshire, where he worked as a systems programmer for a computer company.

In 1969 Coetzee received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas with a dissertation on Beckett.  From 1968 to 1971 he taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo.  While in Buffalo, Coetzee started to write his first book, Dusklands (1974), which consists of two closely related novellas, one about America and Vietnam, the other, ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’, set in the 1760s.  In 1972 he became a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, at that time an institution for whites, and was later appointed professor of literature.  From 2002 Coetzee has lived in Australia with his partner, Professor Dorothy Driver.  In an interview he said, that ‘leaving a country is, in some respects, like the break-up of a marriage.  It is an intimate matter.’”

            Carl:  Yes, that I can certainly understand why he won the Nobel Prize.  He wrote very precise sentences.

Carl:  Getting back to themes, the author kept referring to the three young men who committed the assault as tax collectors.  I think that plays into why she accepts the rape, and decides to do nothing.

            Stan:  This is interesting.  In effect the daughter doesn’t have rights.

            Jane:  There is this strong theme of the oppressor becoming the oppressed in South Africa.  Lucy recognizes that she has to adjust to the mores of those who were formerly oppressed by white society.  She feels a certain cultural guilt, David has not  accepted that concept of cultural guilt.

            Carl:  David is totally clueless about all of this.  When Petrus announces that he intends to marry Lucy, he (David) wonders why she would do this?  It is inconceivable to him.  But she accepts it.

            Jane:  David’s life seems to be a metaphor for the new emerging South Africa, where the past becomes less and less relevant to the present.  David represents the white, middle class, Euro-centric intellectual perspective. He maintains the anachronistic position of wanting to be a professor teaching 19^th century Romantic British Poetry and European language. Then he is thrust into the role of teaching communications, a discipline which he holds in disdain.  His students have no insight into the intricacies of the poetry he wishes to teach.  So there has been an evolution of the society, and he does not wish to evolve with it.  He pursues the study of Byron with the fantasy of writing an opera.   Some writers see Byron as an alter ego of  David Lurie.  Byron fell into disgrace in England because of some blatant affair, and went off to Italy to live with the husband and father of this Italian lover.  This becomes the theme David’s opera.  And what about the opera?  What happens in the evolution of his concept of the opera?

            Mary:  The readers witness David Lurie crumble bit by bit.  He never was able to regain in his mind what he had before.  He didn’t just have awful experiences, and then have a turn of fortune.  He had these awful experiences, and then had some more.

Carl:  I also wondered about the whole animal thing and why did he spend so much time talking about that?

Stan:  Maybe he was talking about sheep in relation to stem cell research, or the right to create something just to dominate it or use it for one’s own purposes.  The feast, for example.

Carl: I see symbolism in that the daughter, Lucy, was a sacrificial lamb.

Jane:  Coetzee was an animal rights philosopher, and had written another book on that subject, I understand that he is a vegetarian, that he feels he has a relationship with animals that come onto his land, that they don’t necessary have a relationship with him, but that he respects them. This sheds light on the episode of the tethered sheep that were to be slaughtered for the feast. 

            Mary:  At the end he took the dog he loved and loved him, and sacrificed him when he didn’t have to yet.  I don’t know what that meant.  It was very sad.

            Mary:  I think that reflected the author’s views of, perhaps, respect for animals.

            Jane:  What the meaning was of that last scene?  He could have deferred the decision, could have saved the dog temporarily.  Why did he sacrifice the dog then when he didn’t have to?

            Mary:  He could have taken the dog to his daughter’s farm, if he had made positive effort to do anything, but he didn’t.  He was a real mess. .

Carl:  He reads from the novel the last few sentences of the episode when Lurie gives up the dog, carrying him into the surgery “like a lamb”.  What Lurie is giving up?  What is that a metaphor for?  That dog/lamb.

            Jane:  A lamb is clearly a traditionally used as a symbol of a sacrificial animal.

            Mary:  (Continuing the thought that David seemed paralyzed to take decisive action) He spoke of the opera and all the work he did to on it, but never completed it.

Jane:   David Lurie scaled down what he felt he could accomplish with the opera.  He intended it be a romantic opera with full voices and chamber orchestra, and his concept end ends with a homely, middle-aged dissatisfied woman with a plaintive voice yearning for her past romance.  The musical accompaniment became a humble banjo-type instrument.  He felt, for love of the memory of this woman; he needed to write the opera, and then abandoned the effort saying, “Let intellectuals of the future expound on this theme.”  Then he added parenthetically, “if there are any”, as if believing that western culture was dead.

            Joyce:  The book went into so many directions.  There was the theme of the relationship to God.  Isaacs, the father of Melanie, said he (Lurie)  was to ride out the plan God had for him. 

            Jane:  Isaacs asked if Lurie had come to him to intervene for him with the university, but no, he would not, that it was God’s plan that he ride out his suffering, or guilt or disgrace. 

            Jane:  Let’s turn to the horrific scene at Lucy’s farm.  The assailants kill all the dogs.  In South Africa dogs were often bred by white farmers to attack the blacks.  All these dogs were aggressive breeds; thus there was a justification to kill the dogs. The killing was not wholly gratuitous when seen in this historical context.

            Mary:  The assailants came onto the farm with bad intentions. It was strange that Lucy was either too naïve to recognize this, or was resigned to her own victimization.  She did nothing to try to protect herself.  She invited them in when it was obvious they were not her every day next-door neighbors.  Why did they come?  She didn’t believe they came to destroy the farm and kill the inhabitants.  She believed they came to attack her.  She thought they came because they could.  She believed there might have been complicity with Petrus.  Incredibly, she then went to the party Petrus gave.

            Carl: These were her neighbors now.  She wanted to stay on the farm.  Her offer to Petrus was that she would marry him and give up her land, but she would not give up her house.

             Irene:  At the beginning of the story Lucy views Petrus as more than a partner.  I  was immediately curious about the relationship. At the beginning he seemed little more than a hired hand.

            Jane:  You recall that when David Lurie works side by side with Petrus, he muses as to whether Petrus will pay him a wage (with a note of irony).  Here is a reversal of roles, the white intellectual doing physical labor at the direction of the black man.  It is yet another political metaphor.

            Mary:  David Lurie he wasn’t much of a man.  At the outset, he was a teacher; he liked seducing women, if he could find them.  He preferred young women.  His relationship with Lucy’s stepmother was interesting.  It was disturbing to see him at the home of the Melanie’s family and then become aroused by the other young daughter, after all he had been through.

            Jane:  He was a real Byronic figure, was he not? His view of women was typified in the quote from the seduction scene of Melanie,  “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.”  “She does not own herself.  Beauty does not own itself.”

            Mary:  Then he turns around and has a relationship with a rather physically unattractive animal rights proponent.

            Jane: Bev was such a proponent, but ironically was also the euthanizer of the animals.  She has this power over animals who trusted her, but the irony is that she often killed them. 

Jane: Let’s examine the struggle  by David to explain to himself the sociological significance of the attack on Lucy and himself as shown in the following quotation:

“A risk to own anything:  a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes.  Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes.  Too many people, too few things.  What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day.  That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory.  Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant.  That is how one must see life in this country:  in its schematic aspect.  Otherwise one could go mad.  Cars, shoes; women too.  There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them.” 

Yet, Lurie hasn’t grappled with the question of what happens to women in the social struggle in this larger society.  Nor has he even shown insight into the impact of his sexual dalliances upon those women in his life. He has no understanding as to what went on in the minds of the young student, Melanie, and that of the East Indian prostitute, a mother dedicated to her child.  He never had insight into these women and their needs.  

Contrast of David and Lucy, Parent and Child, Perception of Context in the World

Jane:  Lurie’s saving grace was his attempt to understand his daughter as a result of her trauma, but he never could grasp what she was thinking.  The more he tried, the less he understood.  He clearly loved her, and he tried.  She accused him of being too abstract in his view of the world; she was grounded more in the concrete, in what would work today.

Carl:  Abstraction was his way of thinking.  Lucy’s way of thinking was very different, based on practicality, accepting the new reality in South Africa.

Mary: I do not believe that Lucy thought much.  She just reacted to her life.

Carl:  No, I felt she had thought it through.  She had a deeper understanding of what was happening in the new South Africa.

Mary:  Some people have an understanding without really thinking it out in their own minds.  It is kind of an emotion, or feeling that influences their actions. Their reactions are intuitive. 

Jane:  Lucy was closer to the earth and closer to what was going on in the frontier than David was, coming from the city.  There was a gap in their view of the world.  (Jokingly) No daughter of mine is going to adopt this life style (general laughter). 

Carl:  The days of Byron were gone.  These were the days of Communication 101.  That’s the reality of today’s society. David resisted that reality. Lucy’s life and.David’s life were out of sync.

Jane:  Children often veer off on courses that their parents don’t want for them. Lucy had an intellectual father, and a middle-class mother who returned to Holland.  Lucy seemed to reject many of their values and lifestyle. First, it appears she was a lesbian.  She had chosen a bohemian life-style; she lived  in a commune where she engaged in artisan craft work. Her life becomes solitary, a life on a small farm where she subsists modestly by selling her produce at a small-scale farmer’s market. She has ostensibly rejected many of the values and the life style of her parents.  She became more closely allied with what goes on in the fringes, the rural frontier of the society.  She depended upon Petrus to assist her in doing what she could not do. 

Carl:  This is another level of the book’s focus, the child rebelling against the parent.  This is a universal phenomenon theme.

Jane: David  tried to hold on to that relationship as a parent.  There is an interesting allusion to Byron at the end of Byron’s life about his daughter dying of malaria who cries “Father, help me, help me.”  He does not respond to her; he has given up on life.  There seems to be a parallel between Byron and David Lurie here. David becomes helpless in the face of Lucy’s trials.

Carl:  One of the assailants was not psychologically normal and was a relative of Petrus. Petrus takes on his crime, and his way of resolving this is to marry Lucy and become her protector from now on.  Lucy insists on having this child.

            Jane: She wants Petrus to adopt this child.

            Jane:  Lucy talks about how the assailants attacked her with such hatred.  David tries to explain that it was not personal, that it is history speaking through them.

            Carl:  Does this unborn child represent the hope of South Africa?  Is that why she doesn’t want to report this as a rape?

            Jane:  This is an interesting concept.  Remember, she said she wanted to be reduced to nothing.  She’s taken on the disgrace of being raped.  Perhaps at another time in another place, she says, I would want to report it, but not here, not now, not in South Africa.  I want to divest myself of everything.  All I want is the privacy of my home.  You have to have permission to enter my home, but you can have everything else.  Petrus will protect me. 

            Remember the neighbor, the old Afrikaner, who wanted to give David and Lucy a gun.  She said that it was just a matter of time before he was found with a bullet in his back, because if he had been there and reacted the way one traditionally would have reacted, the new order would not have tolerated it.  So, she concluded, if I want to stay here, this is what I have to do.  I have to submit to this.

Carl:   I would like to know more about the East Cape, and what has happened there historically. It’s a disturbing book. (General agreement)

Jane:  There are a number of literary and cultural allusions in the novel.

In addition to the Byron thesis, Coetzee has apparently had some interest in Faust. I have recently seen the opera, Faust, by Gounod, with the theme of the older man seeking the passion of young love.  Mephistopheles tells Faust to pledge him his soul, and he will give him access to the lovely young woman.  There are some parallels to David Lurie and his infatuation with youthful beauty.

              In examining the evolution of his relationships to women he was seemingly in a downward spiral. The first prostitute had some personal dignity, the next, not so, then there came the young girl who passively tolerated him. Then the story moves to his sexual encounters with Bev Shaw, and he says “It has come to this.”  This distaste was based on his reaction to her physical appearance rather than her spiritual or character attributes.

David was very vain, and had been attractive and was not unlike the young Byron. As he grew older, he became less attractive.  There is much in this theme of growing old.  He ruminates about the aging process.

Jane:  The exception, of course was his strong affection for his daughter. (General agreement).

In thinking of his relationship to women, he says to Lucy that it may be better not to feel passion at all.  Lucy responds that she has sworn off feeling of passion.  She berated her father for “taking women”.  She asks him what it was like. Rather like rape? A sexual attack?  These were stern words from a daughter to her father.  She personally becomes passionless after this attack.  She is withdrawn.  Even in her passive acceptance of her fate, she is passionless.

Joyce:  The implication is that there had been a woman living with her, and that theirs was a lesbian relationship.

Mary:  The partner may have not wanted to stay on the farm.  Women alone in a place like that would feel vulnerable.

Jane:  Lurie quoted Dante, which is consistent with his being a modern language scholar, particularly Dante’s Inferno, with souls grappling with their fate in their inferno. 

In that regard, what about the fire imagery throughout the book?

For example, Lurie’s being set afire.  (General recognition and agreement noting fire as a symbol used throughout the novel).  Other examples of this:  the cremation of the dogs, flames of passion, his audacious admission to Isaacs of Eros inflaming his passion toward his daughter, and finally, the dull flame, not a hot burning flame, representing his character as the traumatic events unfold.

            Jane: So did you really think that David Lurie was a bad guy?

            Mary:  Yes  (General laughter).

            Carl:  I felt he was in a situation where the earth was shifting under him, and he couldn’t adapt, couldn’t understand it.  I didn’t see him so much as a bad man as a clueless man.

            Mary: I thought he was an unpleasant man.

            Carl:  Unpleasant, yes.  Arrogant.  When he’s first accused at the university, he believes defending himself is beneath him.  He’d rather be drummed out of the university than stoop to the level of being judged. 

            Jane:  What ostensibly set him off at the hearing was the feminist interrogator.  While we as readers may have some sympathy for the victim, the interrogator expressed herself in such a rigid, accusatory fashion, that the allegations were perhaps over-stated.  This was a man with intellectual pride, an egoist, who was not going to bend to that level of accusation.

            Mary:  He had taken pleasure in this young girl, and really did not expect the accusations.

            Stan:  I agree.  He was so arrogant; he did very risky things.  For example, going to her home.  He set himself up.

Jane:  there is a suggestion that Melanie’s boyfriend instigated reporting him, not Melanie.  Remember, she had come to his home to stay for a while, which he found intrusive.  He didn’t want to take responsibility for her; he just wanted to have his way with her. She had obviously had a falling out with her boyfriend.  He was nasty, pushy, with his black leathers and motorcycle. He threw spitballs at David Lurie during the play. 

But note, Lurie was very much the voyeur, going back to see Melanie one more time when she was on stage. 

            Carl:  This was mind-boggling.  That they were going to break bread together.  Why did the father invite him in?

            Carl:  Isaacs was very religious, so there may have been an element of Christian charity.

            Jane: what of the fact that there was a parallel in the feelings of David Lurie regarding the rape of his daughter and the feelings of Isaacs that Melanie had in effect been raped?  (General agreement)

            Carl:  There was both a social meaning, and a personal disgrace. I marked the following passages where Lucy tells David (pps 204 and 205):

  “’Say I accept his protection. Go to Petrus and tell him I’m that I give up the land.  Tell him that he can have it, title, deed and all.  He will love that’ There is a pause between them.  ‘How humiliating,’ he says finally. ‘Such high hopes, and to end like this.’  ‘Yes, I agree, it is humiliating.  But perhaps that is a good point to start from again.  Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept.  To start at ground level.  With nothing.  Not with nothing but.  With nothing.  No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.’ ‘Like a dog’  ‘Yes, like a dog.’”

Jane:  In addition the theme of disgrace is evident in the oppressive role of the colonial Afrikaners in South Africa.  There is the literal personal disgrace of David Lurie in his moral decadence and fall in power.  There is disgrace on the part of the university that permitted the scandal to occur. 

Carl: There is the disgrace felt by Melanie’s parents, particularly her father.

Mary:  I don’t think you can say that about the daughter. The taking apart and starting again, going back to nothing.  You may not be able to call that a disgrace as you would what happened to Lurie. In the beginning he had such powers and expectations, all of which he lost by the end of the book.  The humiliation of subjugation.

Jane:  Then we have the question, do the subjugated become the subjugators?

Carl:  Yes, do you end up with hope or not?  I am reminded of Cry theBeloved Country.  That story ends up with hope for South Africa.

Stan: Or is it just the same play with different characters?

Carl:  It’s not that parallel.  No, it is a different time and set of circumstances.  Then the whites were on top.

Jane:  I have read varying analyses of his style.  Some view the spareness as elegant and concise.  Others say he had a tendency to oversimplify, and not flesh out his characters.

In my mind, he sometimes drew his characters with a few brush strokes. For  example, the evocation of Petrus—the big silent black man.  If you recall the incident when David asks Petrus, while working on the irrigation pipes, if he knew of the attack on Lucy.  He tried to pull out of Petrus his reaction.  It appeared that Petrus didn’t want to talk with him about the attack. Eventually, Petrus said that it was a very bad thing.  David tried to pull out more.  Yes, the police need to investigate, he responded.

 What was the character of Petrus and what was his motivation to say so little?  Was he saying the minimum number of things to maintain his position, and to perhaps eventually secure more land?  Perhaps this was Coetzee’s plan, to leave the character and motivations of Petrus ambiguous.

Joyce:  To me the characters did not seem like real people.  They seemed like stereotypes.  You never got to know any of them, even David Lurie.  You never became familiar with him and truly learn his thought processes, at least I didn’t.  Perhaps stereotype is the wrong word—maybe the characters were symbols of certain elements of South Africa.

Mary:  You’re probably right.

Jane:   I certainly felt we had an insight into David’s thought processes.  We may not have known him well, but certainly, the author highlighted certain of his preoccupations, for example, his fear of aging, his passions, class snobbery, and intellectual snobbery—none of them complimentary characteristics.  And yet I never believed he deserved what he got.   He certainly suffered in a way that he deserved.

Mary:  No, when it happened, you didn’t say,  “Good!”

Carl:  I looked up  Coetzee’s Disgrace in Wikkepedia.  There was a controversy that emerged in South Africa upon publication of the book.  The African National Congress brought charges against Coetzee and the book before the South African Human Rights Commission.  They charged that the book presented a damaging image of post-apartheid South Africa. The alleged it was a powerful example of white racist stereotyping of blacks.  The author dismissed the charges saying the charges were superficial and outright dangerous. 

Jane:  That sounds like Coetzee.

Carl:  Actually, it sounds kind of like David Lurie.

            As I review this transcription, I regret the missed opportunities to flesh out interesting and potentially fruitful concepts.  This could have been remedied by a stricter adherence to a point-by- point outline, or insistence to stay with a potentially interesting comment by a member.  But, ideas and shared impressions ebb and flow erratically.  I felt it important to air as many ideas and interpretations as possible of this multi-layered book and elicit full participation from all the members.  I appreciate that I am not teaching a graduate course in literary analysis.  Rather, within a very short time period, I am facilitating a discussion among intelligent lay readers who need not feel inhibited in their comments.

It was my hope to get beyond the visceral reactions of those who were initially repulsed by the unsympathetic David Lurie character and the horrific events that ensued.  It appears that some of the many layers of this excellent book were revealed.  All participants subscribed to the importance of the historical context of the story in post-colonial apartheid South Africa. They viewed events unfolding as metaphors for changing social realities and mores.  They focused on the reversal of power between the subjugators and the subservient.  David’s responses to external events, his evolving character, were to them metaphorical.  They recognized his insensitivity to and sexual use and abuse of women, but sympathized with a father’s outrage and pain upon the violation of his daughter. They commented on Lurie’s evolving sympathies to animals and their victimization.  We touched upon literary allusions and symbolism.  They hit upon the themes of vanity, arrogance, intellectual irrelevance, youth vs. age, parent vs. child, submission to God’s will, paralysis to act, disgrace and contrition.

In short, the consensus was that this exercise was a most worthwhile examination of an excellent book.