A fine balance

Some words are more interesting than others. I was reminded of this forcibly when I saw the trailer to the new movie Disgrace, based on a J. M. Coetzee novel. Single-word titles are always a tricky situation, because a writer’s craft is essentially one of arrangement – the true but annoying phrase “the music is between the notes” can equally be said of words. When you have a title with just one word, there is nothing you can do to add to its poetry, and so the task becomes one of selection rather than arrangement. Can your single word carry a book? Not all of them can.

Disgrace is a word I always thought I knew, until I saw the trailer. Putting a single word into a title is like putting it under a microscope, or hitting it with a floodlight – it becomes disassociated from other words, and bares itself for inspection. For instance, until now, I never thought of “disgrace” as a word with a prefix; it was just a single unit, like “honour,” which my thesaurus tells me is its antonym. But now I look at its two parts, “dis” and “grace,” and the word changes completely. It now becomes a word that means through negation, like “unnerve” or “misplace” – it has no definition, but rather un-definition.

The word itself continues to propel us down this path. Understood this way, “disgrace” is a negation of “grace,” which I find surprising. Have you ever thought of disgrace as the opposite of “grace”? What is grace? I want to steer clear of etymology and dictionary definitions as much as possible. It may be that they will help clarify, but I’m interested in my personal experience with these words and the strangeness of their meaning. Honour may be personal, but disgrace as its opposite strikes me as a social construct – disgraced by your family, your community. Grace is a much more interesting word than honour, I think, because it’s harder to pin down. To me it suggests elegance, simplicity, and what I can only describe as a profound awareness of mortality. To dis- a word whose definition is so fragile and ephemeral is almost a violent act, a collapse of all its subtlety of meaning into a monochrome negative.

But the negative, too, is interesting, because dis- is only one of many such prefixes. What if the word was not disgrace, but ungrace? Un is flat, neutral, mathematical – hinge/unhinge, wind/unwind, do/undo. It passes no judgment, adds no further meaning; it’s like a switch. Mis-, as in place/misplace, apprehend/misapprehend, always has a sense of mistake to it, of something not gone right. De- implies a reversal, a kind of rewind through time – deconstruct, desensitize – and is a less personal prefix than mis-. Which brings us to dis-. Dismantle, displace, disembark. There is something wilful about the prefix, a sense of human agency that doesn’t come through with the others. A useful comparison is misplace and displace – one is an accident, the other is a deliberate act, and I can’t help but think of the word disturb, which lies at the heart of all these dis- words.

What does it mean, then, to disgrace? The more I think about the word, the more unsettled I feel. I’m not exactly sure what grace is, but I know it’s a quality that I should aspire to. There is a rightness, a fineness and a beauty to it, that is smeared by that most deliberate and therefore cruel of prefixes; witness the sounds of the syllables, the “dih” and the “gray” both washed out by sibilance. The word is a terrible smear, terrible because it is personal and wilful, and gives us the intact word “grace” in the second syllable but shatters its sense with the first.

I am constantly amused and annoyed by single-word titles of romantic fiction novels, like Heartbeat or Lightning or Bittersweet or what have you (these all generated by an Amazon search for “Danielle Steel”). They pale under the spotlight, reveal their clumsiness and lack of depth. You delve into them, and hit a wall. A word like disgrace, by comparison, invites deeper and deeper listening. A title is always a risk, but a good writer, one that is sensitive to the musicality of words, can sort through the thousands of words that are dumb and find the one, the right one, that speaks.