In his essay, “‘Is it to late to educate the eye?’: David Lurie, Richard of St. Victor, and ‘vision as eros’ in Disgrace,” Bill McDonald is primarily concerned with the nature of erotic vision in Coetzee's novel, and the possibilities — and limitations — of the redemption that vision represents. The central character in Disgrace, David Lurie, is a literary critic, and McDonald has taken seriously the account we are given of Lurie's main scholarly works, in particular, his monograph on the twelfth-century Christian mystic, Richard of St. Victor. McDonald shows how this work, as well as Lurie's books on Boito's opera Mefistofele and Wordsworth's sense of history, informs the development of Lurie's character, as well as Coetzee's novel on a more structural level. McDonald describes the transformation of Lurie's “disgrace” into a kind of “grace,” parallel with, as McDonald writes, “the contemplative, ascetic spirit” if not the precise stages of the soul's journey to redemption described in Richard's writings. Coetzee's novel, however, works in a modernist or perhaps postmodernist mode, with an ambiguous conclusion — ironic, ambivalent, indeed, according to McDonald, inconclusive. Although he does not discuss in detail the surprisingly harsh criticism Disgrace has received for the various perspectives on post-apartheid South Africa that some readers have attributed to it, McDonald makes it clear that the novel's politics must not be understood as either an independent issue or as an allegorical counterpart to the various sexual relationships presented in it.