96 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
Lurie’s moral “awakening” in Disgrace , the changes are consider-
ably different.
One marked distinction is the importance of the Magistrate’s
embeddedness within the disciplinary power structure, which for
much of the novel confounds his attempts to follow his conciliatory
cosmopolitan impulses. Indeed, the Magistrate’s transformation
depends on the character’s removal from a position of considerable
sociopolitical authority. In keeping with the novel’s depiction of the
corporeal nature of disciplinary power, such a removal involves the
character being physically subjected to the same imperial violence
that has ultimately grounded his authority. As numerous commen-
tators have noted, this violence has a purging effect, stripping the
protagonist of his sense of dignity and dissociating him from power
in the eyes of the townsfolk. The Magistrate’s mock hanging in the
town square offers a chilling example of one of the many instances
in which his tormentors try to erase the memory of his privileged
position within the imperial power nexus. Taken out in front of
his former subordinates and fellow citizens, he is forced to don a
woman’s smock and beg for his life, an event that pushes him “past
shame” (p. 128).
While such sequences are disturbing in their own right, the
unapologetically frank and graphic disclosure of the events, chan-
neled through an internally focalized first-person narrator, makes
them all the more challenging to read. Having “lost his last ves-
tige of authority the day he spent hanging from a tree in a wom-
an’s underclothes shouting for help,” the Magistrate is reduced to a
clown-like figure, performing “tricks” for his jailers (p. 136). This
insistence on emotional honesty borders on aggression, with the nar-
rator seeming intent on forcing the reader to live through the char-
acter’s collapse of self-dignity. “I smell of shit,” he informs us: “I
creep around in my filthy smock; when a fist is raised against me I
cower” (p. 136). It is quite clear in this instance that the Magistrate
is undergoing a form of self-collapse—a radical and violent disinte-
gration of the concept of self. What is yet more unsettling about the
scene is the apparent carelessness of the protagonist, who appears to
reach a point in which he feels indifferent to the concept of shame
(p. 128). Indeed, he positively appears to indulge in conveying this