A Major Theme To Both Master Harold And The Boys And Disgrace Is That Of Education. How Do The Respective Authors Use Symbols To Show This.

Tris Gibbons

A Major Theme to Both Master Harold and the Boys and Disgrace is that of Education. How do the respective Authors use symbols to show this. Fugard uses the theme of education in Master Harold and the Boys to illustrate the differences between a naïve young white boy and a wizened older black man; where as in Coetzee's Disgrace, it is used to show the realization Lurie has about what he is now, and what he has been. Although there are many different themes in both pieces, they all have a link to this central theme of education. Master Harold is an auto-biographical story relating to an incident in which, as a boy, Fugard spat in the face of one of his parents’ black servants. It is this episode and its effect on Hally that Fugard is trying to get across in this play. To begin with Hally and Sam seem very close and the racial rift between them disappears. Through the Kite Story, Sam is shown trying to be a good father figure to a boy whom he sees has a poor father. In comparison to this, Lucy seems not have had a dependable father figure in her life, and perhaps this is a reason why Lucy is suggested as being homosexual. It seems that both Hally and Lurie, a huge event is needed (one psychological, the other physical) to choose the right father figure to follow or to become. These texts both address the symbol of family, but from opposite angles. Hally is the son being taught by Sam and his Father, while Lurie is the teacher learning from his daughter and the events that happen. Disgrace is narrated in the free indirect style allowing us to read what is both inside Lurie’s mind and out side so as a result we get his thought as well as an external telling of his story. Despite not wanting to see his father and complaining of his drunkenness Hally admits “I love him” demonstrating the ties that exist between father and son despite such neglect. While in Disgrace we do not find out Lucy’s explicit feels for her father, we can assume they are, before the rape, not close as he thinks to himself “a year has past, and she has put on weight”, showing they are not in regular contact. The result of this relationship in context to the rest of the novel that Lurie must learn to leg go of Lucy and let her make her own way in life; she tells him “I cannot be a child for ever, and you cannot be a father for ever”, while Hally has to learn which fatherly to allow to be his role-model, and must decide what path he will take in life as a consequence. Race is a large issue in both these texts; while Master Harold deals with South Africa during apartheid in 1950, Disgrace deals with the situation after the end of apartheid around 1995 – however this is only a guess as Coetzee does not put a date on it, there seems to be a misunderstanding of social place in the novel, with both whites and blacks trying to find their new places in society. Both works have a different symbol for this. Fugard deals with the impact of apartheid with the immediate slang of “boys”, meaning black servant and also the story of the kite. Hally at the time didn’t realise that it was strange to see a “little white boy and black man old enough to be his father, flying a kite” and he didn’t realise that Sam couldn’t stay and sit with him because it was a whites only bench. Sam later says “that’s not the way a boy grows up to be a man…but the one person who should have been teaching you what that means was the cause of your shame”. Sam gives Hally a choice of how he will live his life if he continues to support apartheid by saying, “you’re going to be sitting up there by yourself for a long time to come and there won’t be a kite in the sky.” Fugard uses weather in his story of the kite to show that even though flying a kite is a symbol here or racial unity; it can only exist under certain circumstances – or rather, you can only fly a kite in good weather. Lurie must accept that his age and his waning power; it is this that he is meant to learn. The episodes throughout the novel force him to change. Initially Bev Shaw is a very plain woman and he describes his affair “…his duty” he carries it out “without passion but without distaste too.” We see Lurie accepting his place in society when he says of the middle

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Tris Gibbons aged Teresa, “is this the heroine he has been seeking all the time? Will an older Teresa engage his heart as his heart is now?” This leads us to wonder whether he has learnt his lesson as regards Melanie, but as we see with his reaction to Melanie’s sister he has not. A white man trying to find his place in the new South Africa is an example of the new democracy and social order emerging at the time when this novel was set. Coetzee treats the symbol of race carefully. He only loosely describes peoples' race but from Lurie's reactions we can often get an idea of that characters heritage. Lurie treats the women who he has sex with as objects, and although we are not explicitly told of their race we can make a guess that Soraya is not white because as a replacement David is told there are “lots of exotics to choose from” and that Melanie is not white either as he says “Melaniemelody, not a good name for her...Meláni: the dark one”. This may be Coetzee showing the legacy of apartheid as Lurie's sexual “triumphs” over coloured women or simply his preference for them over white women. One of the reasons Coetzee gives for Lurie’s reluctance to abandon Lucy to the will of Petrus is because “[he] has a beard and smokes a pipe and carries a stick, you think Petrus is an old style kaffir. But it is not like that at all.” The immediate distinction between the texts is that in Master Harold, Hally is taught while in Disgrace, Lurie is the teacher and occupies a different role in the education process. In both however there is a student-teacher relationship. Hally is taught the law of the world by both Sam (who becomes his voice of reason) and his Father while Lurie gets into trouble for abusing the trust put in him as a teacher as regards to Melanie Isaacs who he has an affair with. Lurie loves study and the pursuit of knowledge. Perhaps, however, he idolises the romantic poet Lord Byron too much. Byron was involved in numerous sex scandals but he is said to have known that a man has a sexual retirement age; where as Lurie obviously doesn’t but eventually adjusts to his new place in society. Mr Isaacs asks him what lesson he has learnt from his experience and he replies, “after a certain age one is too old to learn lessons” and even after this upon seeing the younger daughter describes “the current leaps, the current of desire” showing that outwardly he has learnt his lesson, and feels he is being punished for his actions, however he cannot change his nature because he is too proud. Coetzee uses Lurie's position as a teacher to mark out the points of the story for the reader. His lessons on Wordsworth and Byron illustrate points that he himself has been a victim of or guilty of. With his class he studies a poem by Wordsworth called “A Bare Ridge” he especially focuses on the words “usurp upon” and says that “usurp upon means to intrude or encroach upon. Usurp, to take over entirely, is the perfective of 'usurp upon'”, which the reader will notice is what Lurie is doing to Melanie at this point in the novel. He knows that he should not be having personal relations with a student and expects her to not want this relationship with a teacher. He says when he invites her to lunch, “there is still time for her to tell a lie, wriggle out. But she is too confused and the moment passes”. Dogs are an important symbol of teaching in Disgrace because they play a part in Lurie’s maturing and reshaping opinion of the world and himself. He is depressed and hopeless as his grand opera gradually shrinks in size; eventually he is left playing a banjo to the night with a withered dog by his feet. As Sue Kossev says “David's initial ability to ‘ignore’ a ‘certain residue of sadness’ in animals is undermined at the end of the novel as he learns to put the animals' feelings before his own.,” here she’s saying Lurie is maturing and realising he is no longer the only one that matters. He can give these dogs a last degree of respect “after…the workmen…beat the bags with the backs of their shovels before loading them…it was then he intervened and took on the job himself.” This is a very different attitude for a man who is portrayed by Coetzee as self centred and self denying - showing Lurie becoming a more conscientious man.

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Tris Gibbons This teacher-student relationship also echoes the conflicting father-son relationship in Master Harold. Both these relationships seem to be abused by the more authoritative party. Hally expects a father to be there to teach his son the ways of the world and Sam sees it as his duty to teach Hally what his father is apparently incapable of. Sam can see that Hally’s father’s example is “not the way a boy grows into a man”. However if we consider that apartheid could have continued for much longer than it did, is Hally’s father’s comment of “you must teach the boys to show you more respect my son” really such a bad piece of advice? In this respect, Mark Cummings says “Sam serves as a “father” who tries to teach Hally love and pride, whereas Hally’s real father can teach his son only hate and shame.” It is a piece of advice that would help Hally to live in the world he is born into and avoid some of the collisions (as Fugard describes it) that come with rubbing against the grain of society. While we might be appalled by this thought plenty of people obviously lived this way and this is why it left such a deep scar on South Africa which is one of the themes addressed in Disgrace. Education was restricted in South Africa during apartheid. As a result Hally views himself as Sam and Willy’s teacher because he is having a more formal education than they had. But it becomes apparent that both parties feel they have achieved nothing. Hally tells Sam, “so much for trying to give you a decent education. I’ve obviously achieved nothing” and Sam tells Hally; “A long time ago I promised myself I was going to try and do something, but you’ve just shown me…Master Harold…that I’ve failed”. This failed education is something that also is touched upon in Disgrace. Coetzee raises the question as to whether being a teacher is qualification enough for being a guide when Bev simply says to Lurie, “but you were a teacher” as answer to whether Lurie is a good guide for Lucy. The symbol of dancing is used to contrast Sam’s optimistic view of the world and Hally’s pessimism. It is ironic that the oppressed should be optimistic while one of the oppressors should be pessimistic, and it is this key difference that Fugard aims to highlight. Sam describes the beauty of dancing as, “[it] is what we want to be like, but instead. We’re bumping into each other all the time;” while this is one man’s dream and it is very alluring, it would take great strength of character and will for Hally to try to follow something like that through as a philosophy for life. Hally then says “you left out the cripples…that’s guaranteed to turn the dance floor into a shambles,” because it is always easier to follow the crowd instead of carving yourself a new path. The way in which these two writers use symbols to denote a larger theme is not dissimilar. Coetzee uses Lurie’s love of learning and middle age learning curve to show some learning can’t be learnt and has to be experienced, while Fugard uses symbols to try to tell us that learning is a way out of ignorance and oppression.

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David's initial ability to "ignore" a "certain residue of sadness" in animals is undermined at the end of the novel as he learns to put the animals' feelings before his own. – Sue Kossev

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David needs to learn a lesson from God: David wonders whether "living in disgrace without term" is enough punishment for God to accept from him Sam serves as a “father” who tries to teach Hally love and pride, whereas Hally’s real father can teach his son only hate and shame” Mark Cummings

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