Costello (a clear Coetzeean alter ego) says: “There is no guilt in a slaughterhouse. The animals have done nothing wrong. But watch their eyes as they are led to the bolt. That is utanc. The shame of being. The knowledge that one’s body does not belong to oneself.”
J. M. Coetzee, in his relentless moral seriousness, borrowed utanc to fill that void. He did not offer us comfort. He offered us a mirror. Look into it. What do you see? Not the sinner. Not the criminal. Just the animal, caught in the clearing, with nowhere to hide.
This is a radical extension of the concept. Typically, shame is a human emotion tied to social norms. But Coetzee anthropomorphizes it freely to make a point: We inflict utanc on animals by making them witness their own annihilation—just as the Empire inflicts it on the Magistrate, and just as apartheid South Africa (Coetzee’s homeland) inflicted it on Black bodies under the pass laws and the gaze of the state. Utanc - J. M. Coetzee
No discussion of Coetzee and Utanc is complete without addressing his obsessive theme of animality. In The Lives of Animals (later absorbed into Elizabeth Costello ), the eponymous novelist argues that the true horror of factory farming is not merely pain but utanc . Animals, she claims, live in a state of perpetual, unacknowledged shame—the shame of being used, of having no defenses, of being looked upon as meat.
In the vast and formidable canon of Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee, certain works stand as monolithic pillars of post-colonial literature—novels like Disgrace , Waiting for the Barbarians , and Life & Times of Michael K . However, to understand the true architecture of Coetzee’s moral universe, one must look closely at his shorter, more allegorical works. Among these, (often translated as "Shame" or "Guilt," depending on the linguistic lens, though it is frequently discussed alongside his 2003 Nobel Lecture narrative) occupies a vital, crystalline space. Costello (a clear Coetzeean alter ego) says: “There
No character embodies utanc more painfully than David Lurie, the Romantic poet turned disgraced professor. His shame begins small: a sordid affair with a student, a refusal to repent publicly. But Coetzee pushes him into a deeper circle. After his daughter Lucy is brutally attacked, Lurie is forced to witness her submission to her attacker (Petrus) as a condition of survival. Lurie’s utanc is not just for his own cowardice, but for his irrelevance. He is a man who believed in the nobility of passion, only to discover that in the new South Africa, he is an animal begging for a place to sleep. The novel’s famous final line—“Yes, I am giving him up”—is not liberation. It is the final, quiet surrender of a man who has accepted his own shame as the cost of staying alive.
His punishment for this moral stand is not imprisonment or death. It is Utanc . That is utanc
: It depicts the "New South Africa" and the violent, complex reality of a society in the wake of racial segregation.
But what exactly is Utanc ? It is not, as some hasty readers assume, merely the Turkish word for "embarrassment" or "guilt." In Coetzee’s hands, it transforms into a distinct moral and psychological state—a public, performative, and deeply embodied shame that transcends personal conscience. To understand Utanc is to understand the quiet, agonizing machinery behind novels like Waiting for the Barbarians , Disgrace , and The Lives of Animals .
Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace (1999) is perhaps the most sustained meditation on utanc in the English language. The protagonist, David Lurie, is a professor of Romantic poetry who seduces a young student, then refuses to apologize. After he is publicly shamed by a university committee, he retreats to his daughter Lucy’s farm in the Eastern Cape.