Two—
"The labyrinth of my history":
Dusklands and in the Heart of the Country

"My name is Eugene Dawn. I cannot help that. Here goes." The opening sentences of Dusklands present a subject abandoning itself to the necessities of its history. Similarly, Coetzee's early fiction involves a struggle with colonialism as defining the oppressive but ineluctable conditions of existence and self-consciousness.

Dusklands comprises two parts. Part 1, "The Vietnam Project," is the narration of Eugene Dawn, mythographer for the American presence in Vietnam. Dawn is writing a report on propaganda methods whose ultimate readership is the Department of Defense. Part 2, "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," is the story of an elephant hunter and adventurer in conflict with the indigenous Khoisan of the Western Cape in South Africa. The novel therefore juxtaposes subject-positions within twentieth-century American imperialism and eighteenth-century Dutch colonialism, finding them coextensive in their quest for self-realization through dominance. Parody is the principal method of critique in both parts.^[1] In part 1 the parodied documents are the work of what Chomsky in the context of Vietnam called "the backroom boys," the military bureaucrats and planners in corporations allied to the Department of Defense. In part 2 the parodied documents are drawn from the archives of colonial expansion published by the Van Riebeeck Society in South Africa.

One of the first ruses of all colonial self-representations is to find ways of harmonizing and naturalizing the relationship of the colonist to

the new landscape and its inhabitants(White Writing 8); seen in this light, Coetzee's candid return to colonialism's founding moments of violence represents an attempt to break through the crust of contemporary ideology. The two parts of Dusklands disturb, first, American self-confidence concerning the global defense of democracy (a policy consolidated during the Truman administration and given considerable effect under Kennedy: Eugene Dawn writes his Vietnam Report for the Kennedy Institute in the Harry S. Truman Library) and, second, the only slightly more fantastical white South African presumption about representing a historical link with Western, civilized values on a barbaric continent, a notion fed by the mythology of the frontier. A noteworthy feature of this critique is Coetzee's refusal to offer an easy vantage point from which one might gaze on the fictional subject in full self-possession: the narrating subject resides in its history. Because no other time frame is given in which readers might position themselves—as with Fredric Jameson's model of the political unconscious, history is known to us only in its effects, in the language in which the subject speaks—the critique strikes home, addressing itself to the naturalized structures that maintain their hold over the contemporary consciousness.^[2]

Ideologically sensitive critics of Dusklands have registered misgivings about the juxtaposition of Dawn in the context of the Vietnam War and Jacobus Coetzee in the context of eighteenth-century Dutch colonialism at the Cape.^[3] We should be cautious, however, about taking such misgivings to their obvious polemical conclusion, that is, to the point of inferring that Coetzee wishes to mount a philosophically idealist diagnosis of Western imperialism. In both narratives, solipsism and narcissism, the pitfalls of philosophical idealism, are seen explicitly in terms of the colonist's failure to engage in reciprocal relationships; moreover, Jacobus Coetzee's metaphysics of the gun ("guns save us from the fear that all life is within us" [84]) is more than metaphysical: it suggests an impoverished ethic.

The two narratives are connected, however, not only by their thematic resemblance but more substantially by the sense of displacement and complicity that Coetzee begins to feel as a white South African with an Afrikaner pedigree studying in Texas during the escalation of the Vietnam War. Coetzee has said that complicity was not in question at the time: "Complicity was far too complex a notion for the time being— the problem was with knowing what was being done. It was not obvious where one went to escape knowledge" ("How I Learned about America" 9). But complicity is what the novel, written four or five years later,

undertakes to explore: Coetzee connects his ancestry and current experience, finding ways of making sense of the contiguity of American and Dutch imperialism in determining his own historical situation.^[4] The connections are established, in other words, in the act of authorship itself.

The Critique of Rationality

A specific social identity is interrogated in Dusklands by means of a parodic replication of historical documents. The spirit of rebellion in Dusklands has been seen by Michael Vaughan as a revolt against liberal positivism and a rejection of the aesthetics of liberal realism ("Literature and Politics" 126). Broadly, I agree with these observations; however, Coetzee also goes back to the sources of this positivism and conducts a double-edged critique: first, he historicizes it with reference to the history of philosophical rationalism; second, he exposes the subject-positions and ethical duplicity that are masked by rationalism's objectivist pretensions.

Historicization takes the form of returning positivism to the moment of Western scientific rationality, essentially to Descartes. Hugh Kenner's description of Beckett's parody of Cartesian rationality helps in defining this aspect of Coetzee's project more closely:

The Beckett trilogy [Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable ] takes stock of the Enlightenment, and reduces to essential terms the three centuries during which those ambitious processes of which Descartes is the symbol and progenitor (or was he too, like The Unnamable, spoken through by a Committee of the Zeitgeist? ) accomplished the dehumanization of man. The Cartesian Centaur [the cyclist, representative of a perfect harmony of mind and body-as-machine] was a seventeenth century dream, the fatal dream of being, knowing, and moving like a god. In the twentieth century he and his machine are gone, and only a desperate elan remains: "I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." (132)

Unlike Beckett, however, Coetzee does not allow the skeptic's reconstruction of the cogito to lead to an empty space where form must register pure doubt and where all attempts to produce meaning appear clownish or vacuous; in Coetzee the process is taken in the direction of seeing the founding philosophical moments in world-historical terms. These terms include both the observation that the period of scientific ascendancy coincides with colonial expansionism and the conviction

that in the twentieth century the process is coming to an end with decolonization; the beginning of the process is therefore seen from the perspective of its end. Hence, in the allegory of names in the first part of Dusklands, "Dawn," as the supposedly autonomous "I" of what is also the bourgeois moment, the moment of Crusoe, finds himself in the "dusklands" of history, attempting to reestablish a crumbling edifice by means of the "New Life Project."^[5] "The Vietnam report," says Dawn, "has been composed facing east into the rising sun and in a mood of poignant regret (poindre, to pierce) that I am rooted in the evening lands" (7). In the second part of Dusklands the violence associated with the assertion of scientific rationality in the colonies is explored in various forms, both epistemic and physical. The eighteenth-century frontiersman Jacobus Coetzee (in the archival sources, a grandson of the original Coetzee burgher who arrived from Holland in 1679 and settled in what is now Stellenbosch) also registers the pressures of twentieth-century African nationalism and anticolonialism. Coetzee's whole framework therefore anticipates closely Jameson's more recent account of the beginnings of the 1960s—as a period of diverse and fundamental shifts or "breaks" of consciousness—in Third World movements toward decolonization ("Periodizing the 60s" 180–86).

The two philosophers mentioned most frequently as providing Coetzee with some of his terms in Dusklands are Hegel and Spengler. As Teresa Dovey and others have shown, the pertinent section of the Phenomenology of Mind is the master-slave dialectic. I shall turn to this dialectic more than once in this study, but it is necessary here to note that the master-slave dialectic ought to be seen in the light of Hegel's critique of essential Enlightenment concepts, a critique that shows that the consciousness of freedom—the highest goal of human thought—is impossible outside of social relations. Jameson shows the provenance of this theme in the 1960s in his discussion of Sartre's analysis of the Look in Being and Nothingness, an analysis that was later taken up by Frantz Fanon ("Periodizing the 60s" 188). Coetzee's Hegelianism in Dusklands participates in the same tradition; it is the means whereby the "ontological shock" produced by the presence of the Other under colonial conditions is registered.^[6]

In the case of Spengler the connection has been thought to be largely titular, the idea of "dusklands" being derived from The Decline of the West. However, there might be more to Spengler's influence than this allusion. Spengler distinguishes chronological from mathematical number and "pragmatic" history from "themorphological relationship

that inwardly binds together the expression-forms of all branches of a Culture" (6). Even in his use of linguistic analogy Spengler is a protostructuralist who would have been congenial to Coetzee's efforts to grasp systemic rules. But thematically Spengler is significant in his distinction between theworld as nature and the world as history, which has behind it the classic Heideggerian distinction between being and becoming—to which Spengler connects nature/culture—and which leads to his description of the movement in Western history from culture to civilization. (In later novels Coetzee artfully uses such binary categories as structural mechanisms for the production of writing.) The movement in Western history from culture to civilization, from organic to inorganic relations, is marked in Spengler by the predominance of the world-city over the province and is fulfilled finally in imperialism:"Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated" (36). Appropriately for the present context, the figure who embodies imperialism as "the first man of a new age" is Cecil Rhodes; according to Spengler, "The expansive tendency is a doom, something daemonic and immense, which grips, forces into service, and uses up the late mankind of the world-city stage, willy-nilly, aware or unaware" (37). Dawn's vision of progress develops from similar philosophical foundations and is in the end equally obsessive, doom laden, and self-aware:

When I was a boy making my quiet way through the years of grade school I kept a crystal garden in my room: lances and fronds, ochre and ultramarine, erected themselves frailly from the bottom of a preserve-jar, stalagmites obeying their dead crystal life-force. Crystal seeds will grow for me. The other kind do not sprout, even in California. (32)

But has the master-myth of history not outdated the fiction of the symbiosis of earth and heaven? … In the Indo-China Theater we play out the drama of the end of the tellurian age and the marriage of the sky-god with his parthenogene daughter-queen. If the play has been poor, it is because we have stumbled about the stage asleep, not knowing the meaning of our acts. Now I bring their meaning to light in that blinding moment of ascending metahistorical consciousness in which we begin to shape our own myths. (28)

In addition to historicization, the other method employed in Coetzee's attack on rationality is the laying bare of the narrator's subject-position. The parodic effect here takes in the scientific discourses that have evolved in the wake of the Enlightenment; these discourses, in one way or another concerned with enlarging empirical knowledge, are the principal means whereby the narrators attempt, on behalf of their cultures,

to manage their world and achieve self-affirmation and mastery. The tools evolving in post-Beckett metafiction were at hand in this aspect of Coetzee's work; the example of Vladimir Nabokov's PaleFire is particularly relevant, with its specious scholarship and combination of text and commentary. In Dusklands the method is extended to a proliferation of texts and countertexts, which enables Coetzee to hold up various discourses for objectification.

"Mythography," in "The Vietnam Project," is the first of Coetzee's parodic targets; it is also the most difficult to account for because it is an analytical discourse still in the making at the time, with some resemblance to structural functionalism: "Mythography," says Dawn, "… is an open field like philosophy or criticism because it has not yet found a methodology to lose itself in the mazes of. When McGraw-Hill brings out the first textbook of mythography, I will move on" (33). The passage goes on to develop a direct analogy between mythography and colonial exploration, with the implication that what Dawn undertakes as a contemporary intellectual enterprise is a later and more abstract version of what Jacobus Coetzee undertakes in the interior of Southern Africa. As the analysis of myths and the ways in which cultures depend on them, mythography projects metacritical, metanalytical powers that can be mobilized in the service of domination.^[7] In "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" other discourses come into focus. Narratives of colonial exploration and adventure, descriptions of landscape and manners and customs, and frontier or pioneer history deepen and localize Coetzee's critique, revealing the legacy of key colonial discourses in the ideological management of Southern Africa. I now turn to Coetzee's sources; in both parts of the novel Coetzee alters the original documents in such a way as to shatter the composure of the subject's self-representation.

Parody: The American Context

In "The Vietnam Project" the original documents appear to be taken from a series of studies on "national security and international order" put together by the Hudson Institute, which published a volume entitled Can We Win in Vietnam? The American Dilemma (Armbruster et al.). The book was completed in the aftermath of the Tet offensive in February 1968, when the Viet Cong inflicted severe damage on South Vietnamese and American installations, fueling domestic anxiety in the

United States about the feasibility of pursuing the war. Of the five contributors to this volume, three were in favor of stepping up operations, and two thought the United States should cut its losses and get out. The introduction by Herman Kahn, a member of the prowar group, provided Coetzee with his epigraph:

Obviously it is difficult not to sympathise with those European and American audiences who, when shown films of fighter-bomber pilots visibly exhilarated by successful napalm bombing runs on Viet-Cong targets, react with horror and disgust. Yet, it is unreasonable to expect the U. S. Government to obtain pilots who are so appalled by the damage they may be doing that they cannot carry out their missions or become excessively depressed or guilt-ridden. (Armbruster et al. 10)

Unreasonable is the key word here, illustrating the spirit of cool, technological equanimity that Dawn aims for in his report—unsuccessfully, of course. By contrast, Kahn is successful, discussing at some length the "instrumental" position of tying the moral issues with the question of whether the war is actually winnable (204). The rhetorical situation in "The Vietnam Project" relies on the example of the Hudson documents (of course, other corporations, such as Rand, offered similar services). Dawn is a backroom boy who, like several of the Hudson strategists, offers a program for improving the effectiveness of the American war effort. In matters of substance, moreover, the debates being conducted in the Hudson Institute prepare the way for Coetzee. For example, there is much discussion in Can We Win in Vietnam? of cultural factors as being potentially decisive in determining the war's outcome. The more forthright of the critics of U.S. policy, Edmund Stillman, put the case as follows:

Vietnam is a land of strange and violent sects—e.g., Cao Dai and Hoa Hao, "religions" that are also armed movements, and such "criminal sects" like the Binh Xuyen, Mafias with religious overtones. All unwittingly, America has stumbled into a strange and convulsed society—and one that makes a mockery of the traditional American world view, still faithful to its eighteenth-century Enlightenment origins and its nineteenth-century belief in the ability of material wealth to calm any disorder of the spirit. (Armbruster et al. 156)

Coetzee unravels this apprehension—revealing the Euro-American "disorder of the spirit" that Stillman claimed is under control—in Cartesian and Hegelian terms, thus giving it content and a philosophical and critical explanation. Rounding off the argument for withdrawal, Still-

man quoted Santayana in vocabulary directly applicable to Dawn: "A fanatic is one who, having lost sight of his object, redoubles his zeal" (164). Kahn, in opposing critics such as Stillman, argued in favor of seeing the problem in Vietnam as a purely technical matter and as one of having a "theory of victory" (Armbruster et al. 204–12). As Dawn puts it in Dusklands: "There is only one problem in Vietnam and that is the problem of victory. The problem of victory is technical. We must believe this. Victory is a matter of sufficient force, and we dispose of sufficient force" (29).

On occasion, the advocates of military solutions at the Hudson Institute came close to the threshold of moral discretion. For example, Kahn argued that there "may be in this kind of war vital special operations that do not meet these [Geneva Convention] criteria. If so, I would recommend, first, that they be isolated from regular military operations, and secondly, that they be rigorously reviewed and controlled at some reasonably high level" (Armbruster et al. 319–20). Gastil, in a plan for a revised "defense system" for areas controlled by the Viet Cong, suggested that the locals be placed in categories ranging from those to be tried for specific crimes (involving "punishment up to execution") to "persons permitted to live normally and take part in politics." Then he added, "It might well be found just, and certainly expedient, to place present VC cadres in all categories, with most of the people in the last" (Armbruster et al. 416). The acknowledgment of expedience here amounts to an acceptance of the strategic value of terror. Dawn is disgraced at the Kennedy Institute because he breaks this precise threshold repeatedly and explicitly. On one occasion he repeats Gastil's implication exactly: "Szell reports that a camp authority which randomly and at random times selects subjects for punishment, while maintaining the appearance of selectivity, is consistently successful in breaking down group morale" (25). More generally, Dawn's advocacy of a program of assassination and of area bombing transgresses the boundary separating tacit from explicit: "There is an unsettling lack of realism about terrorism among the higher ranks of the military. Questions of conscience lie outside the purview of this study. We must work on the assumption that the military believe in their own explanations when they assign a solely military value to terror operations" (23). Or again: "Until we reveal to ourselves and revel in the true meaning of our acts we will go on suffering the double penalty of guilt and ineffectualness" (31).

An important part of Dawn's report, and the ultimate application of his mythography, is to argue for the broadcasting of radio propaganda that manipulates the psychic reflexes built into traditional Vietnamese culture. Such a strategy is merely the logical extension of the kind of observation offered by Kahn in a contribution entitled "Toward a Program for Victory":

The problem is not to convert the average Vietnamese to our own image, but to work with the materials at hand. This, of course, may mean attempting to fulfill certain aspirations for modernism that many Vietnamese have, but at the same time adapting our programs and policies to the existential situation—particularly the fact that most of our supporters are "peoples of the past" and not a superpoliticized, modern totalitarian movement such as the NLF [National Liberation Front]. (Armbruster et al. 341)

Dawn's science is able to make specific proposals in this direction: by presenting itself as the father figure and trying to instill doubt by means of the "father-voice," America only reinforces the traditional myth of rebellion of the band of brothers; therefore, Dawn argues, the programming must assert previously unknown forms of authority, preferably ones based on raw technological dominance.

A question worth raising here relates to the fact that there was much debate in the United States in the 1960s—reflected in the Hudson papers—about whether the dominant ideology in Viet Cong insurgency was communist or nationalist. The cold war thinking of the State Department under Kennedy clearly regarded the insurgency as communist, hence the commitment of troops; many critics of foreign policy, however, regarded the NLF as nationalist. Not all of those favoring the nationalist argument advocated withdrawal, as Kahn's position illustrates; this is Dawn's point of view as well. It is curious, though, that in Dawn's construction of Vietnamese myth there is no reference to the Marxist Leninism of the NLF, whose formulaic rigidity is more than exemplified in Ho Chi Minh's Selected Writings. Coetzee himself would have been conscious of the language of the NLF and the debate taking place in the United States.

The solution to this puzzle is to be found in the fact that Dawn's report owes much more to the notion of the "primal horde" in Freud's Totem and Taboo than to any respectable ethnographic description of Viet Cong or South Vietnamese traditions (which, when not influenced by Marxist Leninism, were quite heterogeneous, involving a range from

Catholic to Chinese Buddhist). Coetzee's decision simply to ignore what ethnography might tell him is surely deliberate, for the parodic effect depends on Dawn's perspective coming from within imperialism and its traditions (this positioning of the critique will develop as a consistent pattern in later novels); moreover, the decision dramatizes the fact that Dawn's epistemic framework encourages a Manichaean emphasis on cultural difference and the assertion of power.

Parody: The South African Context

In part 2 of Dusklands Coetzee shifts attention from cultural anthropology to historiography. Eugene Dawn's counterpart is the editor and historian S. J. Coetzee, and his mythography is matched by S. J. Coetzee's white nationalist, pioneer history.^[8] Significantly, the dates given for the fictitious course of lectures by S. J. Coetzee at the University of Stellenbosch, from which the afterword is drawn, precisely mark the period of the rise of formal political power of Afrikaner nationalism under D. F. Malan, from the break with the Smuts-Hertzog Fusion government in 1934 to final electoral victory in 1948. J. M. Coetzee is therefore largely concerned with the discursive resources and the legacy of that achievement.

"The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" is a collection of four documents: (1) the narrative itself, a first-person account of Jacobus Coetzee's journey and return; (2) the record of a second journey (also given by Jacobus Coetzee in the first person) under the leadership of Captain Hendrik Hop, amounting to a punitive raid on Jacobus Coetzee's deserted servants; (3) an afterword by S. J. Coetzee; and (4) an appendix, consisting of the "original" deposition or Relaas of 1760 by Jacobus Coetzee. As editor of Jacobus Coetzee's narrative and its official historian, S. J. Coetzee's role in the reproduction of historical data places him at the center of part 2; however, J. M. Coetzee, as "translator," is S. J. Coetzee's antagonist, for it quickly emerges that J. M. Coetzee subversively reproduces the work of S. J. Coetzee, both by dropping intertextual ironies and by actively rewriting the historical documents themselves; he thus explicitly breaks the conventionally neutral stance of translator.

The epigraph to part 2, "What is important is the philosophy of history," comes from a point in Flaubert's parodic Bouvard et Pécuchet when, having discovered the relatively arbitrary status of dates, the protagonists question the relevance of facts in general; this insight

provides the momentary certainty of "Ce qu'il y a d'important, c'est la philosophie de l'Histoire!" (190). Very soon, however, Flaubert's characters discard even this formula for other opinions. In Dusklands the formula emphasizes the fickleness of data and directs attention to the struggle over history. It is interesting that Coetzee should have returned to Bouvard et Pécuchet; his more modest subversion of the archives of the Van Riebeeck Society has, as one of its points of origin, Flaubert's subversion of the scientific documents of the Enlightenment, especially the encyclopedia.

The source of S. J. Coetzee's version of pioneer history could have been provided by one N. A. Coetzee, who in 1958 published in the journal Historia an essay entitled "Jacobus Coetzee: Die Boerepionier van Groot-Namakwaland."^[9] Whereas S. J. Coetzee is defensive and less than ingenuous (in the hands of J. M. Coetzee), the actual N. A. Coetzee is forthright in his treatment of the ancestral frontiersman: "Jacobus Coetzee was een van die merkwardigste persoonlikhede in ons pioniersgeskiedenis" (one of the most noteworthy figures in our pioneer history; 588). N. A. Coetzee drops phrases such as die binneland oop te maak (to open the interior), die voorposte van die beskawing (the outposts of civilization), and die wye onbekende van 'n eie vaderlandsbodem (a profound oxymoron, literally, "the wide unknown of one's own native soil") (593). Most pertinently, N. A. Coetzee argues that Jacobus Coetzee was resourceful in finding ways of exercising his "gesag as blanke… in 'n see van barbare" (authority as a white man in a sea of barbarians) when he approached the "Great Namaquas." His strategy involved keeping out of their camp, claiming the authority of the governor, and negotiating for safe passage in the vernacular (595). This version of the encounter, in relation to the experience of other explorers in the region, notably Carel Fredrik Brink and Hendrik Jacob Wikar, is atypically confrontational, but it is nevertheless N. A. Coetzee's account that endures in the parodic version in Dusklands itself (69–73). J. M. Coetzee's use of sources, in other words, would seem to be directly related to his critical intentions with respect to white nationalism, which found the confrontational version useful to its purposes.

It has been assumed since Peter Knox-Shaw's discussion of Coetzee's sources that the deposition or Relaas of Jacobus Coetzee (reproduced as an appendix to the novel) is the one authentic historical document in Dusklands and that the remaining sections are either fictitious or deliberately corrupted (27). This assumption is inaccurate, however, for Coetzee tampers substantially with the deposition as well. Apart from

minor but consistent alterations in dates and figures, Coetzee significantly omits from and adds to the document. Omitted (among other details that disturb narrative coherence) are references to the friendly disposition of the Namaquas; the fact that Jacobus Coetzee was allowed to pass through the territory without interference; that there was an exchange of gifts (oxen for links from his trek-chain; Wikar 285); and, finally, that he returned with one of the Namaquas who wished to get to the Cape (289)! (Needless to say, N. A. Coetzee omits most of these details as well, since they detract from the confrontational emphasis.) Still more startlingly, added to the deposition (in suitably imitative language) are two accounts of desertion, one involving an "envoy of the Damroquas [who] had not long ago met a treacherous end at the hands of servants afflicted for lack of pursuits with the Black Melancholy; that these servants had fled to the Namaquas he the narrator had first met and dwelt yet among them" (Dusklands 132). The other instance involves an episode in which Jacobus Coetzee was "deserted by his servants but not … disturbed by the aforementioned Namaquas" (133).

J. M. Coetzee therefore omits cordial exchanges from the record and adds desertion. The immediate purpose would seem to be to engineer a certain consistency: Jacobus Coetzee's first-person narrative at the start of part 2 also includes an episode of desertion. The deeper and more salient purpose, however, is that these alterations radically turn the narrative into a game of power. Desertion and its consequences are key components of the movement of the colonizer-self as it runs from assertion to debilitation, with Jacobus Coetzee delivering punishment to the wayward servants in an attempt to reconstitute his authority.

I shall track this movement more carefully in what follows, but the game of power would explain another, equally spectacular alteration. The actual Hop expedition was a fact-finding mission prompted by the original Coetzee's Relaas to investigate the economic prospects in the territory and to locate a people (the Herero) who "are tawny in appearance, with long hair on their heads and are clad in linen, and who it must be supposed are a civilised People" (Brink and Rhenius 5). J. M. Coetzee ignores this original purpose (although he uses details from the Brink expedition in constructing Jacobus Coetzee's narrative), making it a punitive raid on the servants who have taken up with the Namaquas. In rewriting the facts of the Hop expedition in this way, Coetzee seems to have picked up two specific incidents in the events of the actual journeys and conflated them. The first is the murder, during the return journey of the Hop expedition, of a servant named Ruyter by a certain Coenraad

Scheffer (in the novel, "Scheffer" rivals only Jacobus Coetzee in sadism). Ruyter refused an order to fetch water and a struggle developed in which he was stabbed; later the same night, Scheffer shot Ruyter while everyone was asleep. The official narrative of the expedition was amended to conceal the murder from the Chamber of Seventeen in Holland (Brink and Rhenius vii, 115). The second incident concerns an illegal trading expedition (twenty-two years before Jacobus Coetzee's) by a party of burghers; the fact of the expedition was discovered by the authorities when, on the return journey, the Hottentot servants, "with or without their masters' permission, returned armed, and robbed the Great Namaquas, killing seven of them" (Brink and Rhenius 94). As in "The Vietnam Project," in other words, J. M. Coetzee renders explicit what is relegated in the original documents to the borders of legality. "But I have nothing to be ashamed of," says Dawn; "I have merely told the truth" (38).

Knox-Shaw's objection that the "fictional narrative is distinguished throughout by a virtual effacement of economic motive" (28)—a position that has held currency (it is repeated by Teresa Dovey and Peter Kohler)—seems misplaced, therefore, in the light of what the revision of sources does achieve. But the observation is incorrect even on its own terms. The very opening paragraph of "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" deals with the social consequences of the shift in white settlement from burgher to trekboer in the political economy of the eighteenth century, consequences that involved a developing competitiveness between the Boers and Khoisan over land and cattle. The narrative begins with the story of Adam Wijnand, the son of a servant who left home and established himself with "ten thousand head of cattle, as much land as he can patrol, a stableful of women" (61); this tale locates Jacobus Coetzee's bitterness immediately and precisely within this context. If, as Kohler argues (24–25), the background to the story of Adam Wijnand is the history of Adam Kok, then we must deduce that it was precisely to contextualize Jacobus Coetzee in this way that J. M. Coetzee was once again so deliberately cavalier with the historical record, for Coetzee would be omitting Kok's political career in order to emphasize the contest over resources. Jacobus Coetzee himself mentions the object of his journey—to find ivory—when negotiating with the Great Namaquas (75). In S. J. Coetzee's afterword we are also told of Jacobus Coetzee, on the banks of the Great River, dreaming "a father dream of rafts laden with produce sailing down to the sea and the waiting schooners" (128). One might go so far as to say that the novel's

depiction of the material context is subtle enough to be able to plot Jacobus Coetzee's economic options in terms of attempts to revive earlier practices in the colonial enterprise (a raid on natural resources followed by trade) in the face of the threat of impoverishment that the shift from mercantile capitalism to settler pastoralism entailed in the political economy of the Western Cape in the eighteenth century. It would be more accurate to say, however, that Coetzee's interests simply lie elsewhere.

The Quest for Power: Assertion, Preservation, Recovery

"The one gulf that divides us from the Hottentots is our Christianity," says Jacobus Coetzee. "We are Christians, a folk with a destiny.… The Hottentot is locked into the present. He does not care where he comes from or where he is going" (61–62). This categorical emphasis on difference is reinforced in subsequent descriptions of commando raids against the "Bushmen" (62–66).^[10] The final paragraph in these descriptions deals with the rape of Bushmen women, which Jacobus Coetzee represents as offering an ideal of freedom, "the freedom of the abandoned": unlike the colonists' daughters, who connect the white male with "a system of property relationships," a "wild Bushman girl is tied to nothing": "You have become Power itself now and she is nothing, a rag you wipe yourself on and throw away" (65). Shortly I shall discuss the aggression that surfaces in Coetzee's prose in Dusklands, as it does in this instance; for the moment, let me simply refer to this as a fiction of self-assertion on Jacobus Coetzee's part. That it is a fiction soon becomes apparent: immediately hereafter, the narrative proper begins (under the heading "Journey Beyond the Great River"), with J. M. Coetzee putting together from Brink's journal a cursory account of the journey northward that he might get to the encounter with the Great Namaquas as quickly as possible. In this encounter and what follows, the fiction of self-assertion is destroyed—and has to be restored, in the final episode, at all costs.

In the initial moments of the encounter Jacobus Coetzee sizes up the Namaqua leader and is condescendingly pleased with his self-assurance and humanity (this is the Hegelian pleasure of extracting self-validation from the recognition given by the Other), but J. M. Coetzee lingers here, departing from the narrative used in the construction of the journey in

order to delve more fully into the resonance of the moment by means, once again, of an explicit parody:

Tranquilly I traced in my heart the forking paths of the endless inner adventure: the order to follow, the inner debate (resist? submit?), underlings rolling their eyeballs, words of moderation, calm, swift march, the hidden defile, the encampment, the graybeard chieftain, the curious throng, words of greeting, firm tones, Peace! Tobacco! ,… the order to follow, the inner debate, the casual spear in the vitals (Viscount d'Almeida), the fleeing underlings, pole through the fundament, ritual dismemberment in the savage encampment, … the order to follow, the inner debate, the cowardly blow, amnesia, the dark hut, bound hands, uneasy sleep, dawn, the sacrificial gathering, the wizard, the contest of magic, the celestial almanac, darkness at noon, victory, an amusing but tedious reign as tribal demi-god, return to civilization, with numerous entourage of cattle—these forking paths across that true wilderness without polity called the land of the Great Namaqua where everything, I was to find, was possible. (70–71)

Strands are woven together here from a range of sources in colonial discourse, from chronicle and ethnography (such as the references to the death of d'Almeida and to methods of impaling imputed to Shaka) to adventure fiction (as in the wizard and the contest of magic, reminiscent of Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines ). Framing the whole passage is the Conradian emphasis on the psychic journey inward—"the inner adventure"—and on the disappearance of known social conventions, with the implication that these genres of colonial discourse serve to confirm the subject's coherence and authority (while the "forking paths" also mischievously suggest the equivocal nature of the enterprise).

In several ways the preamble to Eugene Dawn's report contains similar attempts at self-assertion, though in Dawn's case the equivocation is more obvious. The account of the relationship with Marilyn (like Marilyn Monroe, the name of conjugal bliss) is a catalogue of failures to achieve connection, sexual and otherwise. Likewise, the photographs of prisoners, which Dawn carries around in his briefcase and regularly fetishizes, involve attempts to get beyond the surface of the picture to actual presence: "Under the persistent pressure of my imagination … it may yet yield" (17). The glint in the eye of the prisoner in the photograph is immediately generalized to all the Viet Cong, while Dawn speaks on behalf of his culture: "We brought them our pitiable selves, trembling on the edge of inexistence, and asked only that they acknowledge us" (18). American violence, imaged in guns, fire, a knife, and

finally rape, is then projected as a hysterical attempt at self-validation in relation to the Viet Cong (18). Just as the structure of Jacobus Coetzee's narrative undermines his self-assertive fiction, so Dawn's attempts to contain his insecurity in the studied objectivity of the report go awry: "I am in a bad way as I write these words.… But I see things and have a duty toward history that cannot wait" (31).

Jacobus Coetzee is undermined early in his encounter with the Namaquas. In direct contrast to N. A. Coetzee's representation of Jacobus Coetzee's rhetorical skills in the local language, we find Jacobus himself acknowledging ruefully, "The irony and moralism of forensic oratory, uneasily translated into Nama, were quite alien to the Hottentot sensibility" (75). Things come to a head when he returns to his wagon to find the servants helpless while the locals pilfer his goods. He lays about him with a whip and the people retreat, but then a woman comes forward to taunt him; he fires into the ground at her feet and scrambles away with his men and oxen. Later that night a fever sets in, however, and the servants return him to the camp to seek help, thus subjecting him to a mild form of captivity. In his delirium Jacobus Coetzee meditates on self-preservation, using the language of metaphysics; like Eugene Dawn, Jacobus Coetzee thus becomes Herakles roasting in the poisoned shirt of Western heroic individualism (34).

The meditations begin with Jacobus Coetzee trying to define himself in terms of an isolated potency: "A great peace descended upon me: the even rocking of the wagon, the calm sun on the tent. I carried my secret buried within me.… I deepened myself in a boyhood memory of a hawk ascending the sky in a funnel of hot air" (80). He hears two voices, "one near, one far. 'Wash my feet, bind my breast,' said the near voice, 'will you promise not to sing?' Far away, from the remote South, the second voice sang" (80). These voices correspond to what S. J. Coetzee later will call "zones of destiny" (116): the near voice represents the appeal of the interior, now modified as an impulse to relinquish assertion and seek reconciliation; the far voice, the voice of the South, represents settlement or civilization. Caught between these zones in an indeterminate cultural space, Jacobus Coetzee must find ways of achieving self-consciousness as an integral being. J. M. Coetzee grants him the language of metaphysical speculation, but it is always inconclusive and, indeed, laconically ironized in the rhetorical context, for the meditations are addressed to "Jan Klawer, Hottentot," with his "savage birthright" (87).

The first of these meditations turns on the explorer's relationship with the landscape. Projecting himself outward from his bed to "repossess my world," Jacobus Coetzee realizes that"under the explorer's hammerblow this innocent interior transforms itself in a flash into a replete, confident worldly image of that red or grey exterior." Not only do the lures of the interior appear as "fictions," but he also has misgivings about his own "interior" being equally insubstantial: "My gut would dazzle if I pierced myself. These thoughts disquieted me" (83). The second meditation, on dreams, is similarly disconcerting. Jacobus Coetzee attempts, without much conviction, to recover the cogito in "a universe of which I the Dreamer was sole inhabitant," but he ends by questioning this proposition as "a little fable I had always kept in reserve to solace myself with on lonely evenings, much as the traveller in the desert keeps back his last few drops of water, choosing to die rather than die without choice" (83). The third meditation is on the subject of boundaries, of how the explorer, in seemingly limitless space and solitude, separates himself from his world. The primary defense against solipsism is the gun: "The gun is our mediator with the world and therefore our saviour. The tidings of the gun: such-and-such is outside, have no fear. The gun saves us from the fear that all life is within us" (84). His argument here is clearly self-defeating, as Dovey has shown (Novels of J. M. Coetzee 92–93), because if Otherness is eliminated by violence there can be no recognition of the subject.

When, in the final meditation, Jacobus Coetzee speaks about the approach of the master and savage toward one another across space, J. M. Coetzee is using Hegel in terms close to the original (Dovey, Novels of J. M. Coetzee 94). However, a distinction is necessary: in Coetzee we do not have master and slave, but master and savage. The Other, prior to his appearance as slave, is the Manichaean Other, with cultural difference inscribed in his Otherness, so that his approach involves the establishment of a threshold near which the explorer feels a genuine vulnerability. It is this threshold that presents itself to the explorer as "an ideal form of the life of penetration" (86). If the savage crosses the "annulus" to enter the master's space, he becomes slave, the Hegelian "inessential consciousness." But it is more frequently the case that there is no crossing of this limit; instead, there is an obligatory exchange of gifts, directions, warnings, demonstrations of firearms, followed by an enigmatic pursuit of the explorer, producing "the obscure movement of the soul (weariness, relief, incuriosity, terror)" that is

felt as "a fated pattern and a condition of life" (86–87). Suspension, irresolution, anxiety: such is the explorer's existential lot.

We have come a long way, therefore, from the crisply efficient prose of the historian S. J. Coetzee: a broken and historicized subjectivity has intruded and subverted the record even before S. J. Coetzee's version of events is presented. The same pattern is found in "The Vietnam Project," where Dawn breaks off the bureaucratic register, saying, "We are all somebody's sons. Do not think it does not pain me to make this report" (28). He later adds that he is speaking "to the broken halves of all our selves," telling them "to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best" (31).

With his meditative delirium over, Jacobus Coetzee steadily "recovers." The recovery is organized around two features of the narrative, the rebellion of the servants, notably Plaatje, and the milking of the carbuncle. (This is surely among the most portentous of carbuncles anywhere.) The rebellion leads to desertion, the final and decisive challenge to Coetzee's authority; the carbuncle is a blessing, for self-inflicted pain enables Jacobus Coetzee to reconstitute himself as an object of consciousness. The theme is taken up in a later narcissistic reverie:

Around my forearms and neck were rings of demarcation between the rough red-brown skin of myself the invader of the wilderness and slayer of elephants and myself the Hottentot's patient victim. I hugged my white shoulder, I stroked my white buttocks, I longed for a mirror. Perhaps I would find a pool, a small limpid pool with a dark bed, in which I might stand and, framed by the recomposing clouds, see myself as others had seen me, making out at last too the lump my fingers had told me so much about, the scar of the violence I had done myself. (103)

During the return journey to the Cape, Jacobus Coetzee's primary concern is to achieve a state of absolute self-sufficiency; of course, such a condition is illusory, and Jacobus Coetzee is perhaps at his most specious in this sequence. After being banished for biting off the ear of a child who taunted him, he turns necessity into a virtue by treating the loss of his wagon, weapons, accoutrements, and servants as a "casting off [of] attachments" (99). The death of Klawer occurs at this point, an event that is repeated in different forms, illustrating the complete subordination of the "record" to Jacobus Coetzee's reassertion of self. Dovey points out how contradictory Jacobus Coetzee's efforts to achieve ontological independence are in this sequence: his attempt to perform the "ur-act" ends in impotence; his calling to God to witness his aloneness

shows his dependence on an imagined consciousness for self-recognition; and his ditty, "Hottentot, Hottentot, /I am not a Hottentot," traps him precisely in the relational position from which he is trying to escape (Dovey, Novels of J. M. Coetzee 107–8).

Because Jacobus Coetzee's experience is so much in polarities, he invents a hypothesis to contradict it. This is the story of the Zeno beetle that has the gift of seeming infinitely resistant to attack. Zeno held that Being is undivided: the category "not-is" is logically unknowable; abstract ideas of motion and plurality are impossible because distance can never be wholly erased; and whatever is plural can simply be numbered. Jacobus Coetzee comforts himself with Zenonian principles, thus forcing what has been a story of fragmentation into a private myth of wholeness and integrity.

On his arrival at the Cape, Jacobus Coetzee plays out an ironic reversal of colonial tropes. If the Hottentots had been "true savages," he might have had a more satisfying encounter with them, he decides. Defining "true savagery" as "a way of life based on disdain for the value of human life and sensual delight in the pain of others" (104), he exemplifies these attributes himself (Knox-Shaw 31). Entering the periphery of colonial property, he attacks a herd of cattle and wounds the herder; on arrival at his own farm, he falls on a lamb like "God in a whirlwind" and enters his house with the liver (106).

The Hop expedition, however, demonstrates Jacobus Coetzee's sadism with horrifying clarity. Its purpose is nothing less than to stage, in the form of a punitive raid, the drive toward self-consciousness on the part of the seemingly reconstituted, male, assertive self. The sequence is made up of violence theatrically ritualized in self-consciousness. Conventions of adventure writing are exposed for this purpose: "We descended on their camp at dawn, the hour recommended by the classic writers on warfare, haloed in red sky-streaks that portended a blustery afternoon" (107). We are also made to watch Jacobus Coetzee observing himself perform his acts of cruelty: "A muscle worked in my jaw," he says, comforting the dying Plaatje, whom he has just shot (113).

The corresponding attempt to regain self-conscious potency in "The Vietnam Project" is the motel sequence, in which Dawn abducts his son Martin and stabs him with a fruit knife as the police arrive. Writing self-consciously in the "present definite," Dawn muses over the possibility of finding a language in which the referent—himself—is not problematized but is instead projected into a stable world of immanent and

verifiable things. He speaks appreciatively of names, especially of songbirds, plants, and insects, which seem to have fullness and self-sufficiency. "Like so many people of an intellectual cast, I am a specialist in relations rather than names …. Perhaps I should have been an entomologist" (37–38). Similar questions are raised about novelistic discourse:"I have Herzog and Voss, two reputable books, at my elbow, and I spend many analytic hours puzzling out the tricks which their authors perform to give their monologues … the air of the real world through the looking-glass" (38). The books are well chosen, for together they imply a bildungsroman of the colonies; Dawn needs their realism in order to authenticate himself, though the very archness of his calculations excludes him from their promise, and the attempted self-recovery is inevitably a failure. Dawn's "true ideal," he tells us, rather like Jacobus Coetzee's Zenonian myth, "is of an endless discourse of character, the self reading the self to the self in all infinity" (40).

Dawn wonders whether a life of action would have saved him from his condition of self-division, but he realizes immediately that "men of action" have in fact created the history that is destroying him:

I call down death upon death upon the men of action. Since February of 1965 their war has been living its life at my expense. I know and I know and I know what it is that has eaten away my manhood from inside, devoured the food that should have nourished me. It is a thing, a child not mine, once a baby squat and yellow whelmed in the dead center of my body, sucking my blood, growing by my waste, now, 1973, a hideous mongol boy who stretches his limbs inside my hollow bones, gnaws my liver with his smiling teeth, voids his bilious filth into my systems, and will not go. I want an end to it! I want my deliverance! (40)

The body situates the self within history, in this case a history comprising desperate acts of self-affirmation, undertaken in the encounter with the Other of Southeast Asia. Thus, a metonymic chain develops involving the body, the child-parasite, and the historical Other; it is this chain that Dawn tries to halt and destroy in stabbing the son, for the chain destroys the coherence of the transcendent self.

The violence of the Hop expedition in Jacobus Coetzee's narrative is so startling as to become a burden for many readers. Knox-Shaw, for example, indicts J. M. Coetzee on humanist grounds for merely reenacting "true savagery" and thereby furthering its claims (33). In response, Dovey points out that Coetzee is refusing the option of a neutralizing

discourse (Novels of J. M. Coetzee 115). There is no question that the episode is projected specifically as violence:

"Stand up," I said, "I am not playing, I'll shoot you right here." I held the muzzle of my gun against his forehead. "Stand up!" His face was quite empty. As I pressed the trigger he jerked his head and the shot missed. Scheffer was smoking his pipe and smiling. I blushed immoderately. I put my foot on Adonis's chest to hold him and reloaded. "Please, master, please," he said, "my arm is sore." I pushed the muzzle against his lips. "Take it," I said. He would not take it. I stamped. His lips seeped blood, his jaw relaxed. I pushed the muzzle in till he began to gag. I held his head steady between my ankles. Behind me his sphincter gave way and a rich stench filled the air. "Watch your manners, hotnot," I said. I regretted this vulgarity. The shot sounded as minor as a shot fired into the sand. Whatever happened in the pap inside his head left his eyes crossed. Scheffer inspected and laughed. I wished Scheffer away. (111)

Such writing is surely transgressive, not in a theoretical manner that enables one to explain it away, but in an aggressive mode that is aimed at readers' sensibilities. The formal explanation for these acts—what Jacobus Coetzee impatiently calls "expiation explanation palinode"—is given directly, and it is predictable: "Through their deaths I, who after they had expelled me had wandered the desert like a pallid symbol, again asserted my reality…. I have taken it upon myself to be the one to pull the trigger, performing this sacrifice for myself and my countrymen, who exist, and committing upon the dark folk the murders we have all wished…. I am a tool in the hands of history" (113–14). A further reason, given by Jacobus Coetzee in explanation of his bitterness, is the "desolate infinity" of his power: undergoing "a failure of imagination before the void," he feels "sick at heart" (108–9). None of these explanations, however, is sufficient to account for the aggressiveness of the prose. I would argue that the violence of the passage and others like it cannot satisfactorily be contained in interpretation, for the aggressiveness remains a social fact that readers have and will continue to give witness to. This argument relies on the description at the start of this chapter, in which Coetzee was said to be taking on, in a combative sense, the legacy of colonialism and its discourses; Dusklands's explosive aggressiveness is a measure of the extent to which this struggle is not only with the conventions of fiction but also with the social and moral framework in which those conventions reside. The game of power is both a form of critical, historical diagnosis, and a fierce attack on the sensibility of literary humanism in South Africa.

The Emergence of The Displaced Subject

Although aggressiveness is one of the consequences of Coetzee's fictive struggle with colonialism, another is the emergence of a displaced subject, a narrator who is not one of the primary agents of colonization but who lives in the conditions created by such agents, and who endures the subjectivity this position entails. Magda in In the Heart of the Country is such a displaced subject, but it is possible to discern its emergence in Dusklands. One of the explanations Jacobus Coetzee gives for his acts is that he is "a tool in the hands of history." After making this assertion, however, he has misgivings: "Will I suffer?" "I too am frightened of death." He dismisses these apprehensions as "a winter story" he uses to frighten himself and make the blankets more cozy, but then he closes with the following reflection:

On the other hand, if the worst comes you will find that I am not irrevocably attached to life. I know my lessons. I too can retreat before a beckoning finger through the infinite corridors of my self. I too can attain and inhabit a point of view from which, like Plaatje, like Adonis, like Tamboer & Tamboer, like the Namaqua, I can be seen to be superfluous. At present I do not care to inhabit such a point of view; but when the day comes you will find that whether I am alive or dead, whether I ever lived or never was born, has never been of real concern to me. I have other things to think about. (114)

This conclusion straddles two possible positions: one poses the larger, existential questions, and another replies. The first position represents that aspect of J. M. Coetzee's authorial narration that would keep alive the options, either for escape—retreating down the corridors of the self—or for the shadings of moral receptivity and complexity. It is the position of the displaced subject. The second position, however, containing the reply, is one in which Jacobus Coetzee tries to shut off those options: "At present I do not care to inhabit such a point of view." It is possible, the paragraph suggests, that under different conditions Jacobus Coetzee might tell a different story of himself, a more subtle story, a story other than the ontological one of assertion, self-preservation, and recovery that we have been given, but only "when the day comes."

In its ambivalence this passage enacts a recognition followed by a denial of complexity. This movement is interesting in the work of a writer who values complexity almost to a fault. In this instance, however, Coetzee is developing a narrative subject who carries his own burdened fascination with, and antagonism toward, a part of his inher-

ited culture. Complexity is curtailed by means of a gesture whose essential function is to preserve the moral imperative of the author's self-distancing from complicity and the imprisonment of naturalized connections. Jacobus Coetzee's gesture of denial or closure, in other words, amounts to a declaration of conscience on the part of J. M. Coetzee, one that says: this is the record; let us allow it to stand and speak for itself. It is for this reason, I believe, that J. M. Coetzee never again allows his authorship to inhabit a narrator as oppressive, as fatherlike, as Jacobus Coetzee. Later such figures are the antagonists of the narrators: Magda's fatherIn the Heart of the Country, or Colonel Joll in Waiting for the Barbarians. Such a narrator has to be inhabited for moral reasons, and appropriately at the start of the corpus, but in the end J. M. Coetzee must leave the Jacobus Coetzees to their own devices.

This is the meaning, I suggest, of the games of self-preservation played by Jacobus Coetzee on his return journey: "I had been set a task, to find my way home, no mean task, yet one which I, always looking on the brighter side of things, preferred to regard as a game or a contest" (104). The game of self-preservation is also J. M. Coetzee's game of surviving the narrative, pursuing its destructive logic to the end. After all, Jacobus Coetzee's games constitute a mise en abîme, a recounting of some of the sequences of the narrative itself: the journey, the punitive raid, captivity and expulsion, and a final game, "the most interesting one," a "Zenonian" approach toward death. "Would I be able to translate myself soberly across the told tale, getting back to a dull, farmer's life in the shortest possible time …?" (105). Games of selfpreservation are a small but important part of what fascinated Coetzee about Beckett; we know this from his commentary on Watt, but one might also recall Molloy's elaborate computations of how to rotate sixteen "sucking stones" from his mouth to the pockets of his trousers and greatcoat (Molloy 69–74). "In each game," says Jacobus Coetzee, "the challenge was to undergo the history, and the victory was mine if I survived it" (105). Similarly, victory for J. M. Coetzee is overcoming Dusklands.

In therapy, Dawn allows the analysts to trace their way through what he calls "the labyrinth of my history." The phrase neatly captures the authorial ambivalence I have been discussing. On the one hand, history is a maze of entrapments for the subject forced to inhabit it; on the other, it leads the doctors astray, providing protection for the subject's vulnerabilities. "My secret is what makes me desirable to you, my secret

is what makes me strong…. Sealed in my chest of treasures, lapped in dark blood, it tramps its blind round and will not die" (49–50). Dawn's resistance to the therapists' attempts to explain him is representative of larger things in the Coetzee oeuvre; by the time he comes to write Michael K, Coetzee will have turned Dawn's "secret" into an affirmation of what is uncontainable in narrative discourse. In other words, if Dusklands is mainly diagnostic and critical in emphasis, it also finds a minor corner in which to position a different, displaced narrative subject, one that will develop and steadily find its own voice, or voices, in the corpus as a whole.

Fictionality Versus The Historicity of Self

Magda in In the Heart of the Country is a "spinster with a locked diary" fighting against becoming "one of the forgotten ones of history" (3). The drama of this novel lies in Magda's attempts to find and speak a life for herself under such conditions, a life in which usual forms of exchange or relationship—from ordinary family bonding and sociability to marriage into colonial structures of kinship—seem either unauthentic or simply unavailable. Without the cultural mechanisms whereby a stable identity can be formed through the reflections of self thrown back by others, Magda speaks an obsessive interior monologue that rarely resembles a language of social intercourse.^[11]   The numbered units of her discourse reflect this lack of reciprocity; at the same time, they create the cinematic intensity associated with the nouveau roman, especially Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy.

Judging from Coetzee's translation and commentary on Gerrit Achterberg's sonnet sequence "Ballade van de gasfitter," he was bringing a diverse range of literary and philosophical sources to bear on the question of the self's relation to language and to others. These sources include Wallace Stevens ("Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"), Martin Buber (I and Thou), Sartre (Being and Nothingness), and a tradition of reflexive fiction going back as far as Sterne. The immediate points of departure in Coetzee's essay, however, are linguistic descriptions in Emile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson of the unstable patterns of reference in pronouns and "shifters." Coetzee draws attention to the way these patterns govern the ontological and metaphysical significance that the terms I and You are made to carry. The similarities between the

essay and the novel are striking, therefore: both take up questions of reciprocity and identity and their dependence on language, and both reflect on what Coetzee calls "the poetics of failure," a history of selfcancelling literature culminating in the "decline of the liberal-romantic notion of the self" ("Achterberg's 'Ballade van de gasfitter'" 293).

In important ways, however, the essay and the novel also part company. The essay describes a paradoxical effect of the "poetics of failure," in which the critique of notions of the self's autonomy retreats into a post-Romantic attempt to erectthe work itself into ontological selfsufficiency. Where "nothing" is represented, the act of representing nothing is substituted; hence, Coetzee can say, "the poetics of failure is ambivalent through and through, and part of its ambivalence is that it must parade its ambivalence" (293). The novel participates in the poetics of failure to an extent, and in so doing it provides a parodic counterpoint to the traditions of liberal realism and pastoral in white South African fiction since Olive Schreiner (Dovey, Novels of J. M. Coetzee 149–68). Despite the transparency of conventions in the novel, there is no literary-ontological recuperation of the kind observed in the Achterberg poem. The closing sentences of the novel provide a convenient illustration of this difference: having wondered what other kinds of literature she might have constructed for herself, and having rejected the idea of inhabiting disingenuous forms of colonial pastoral, Magda says, "I have uttered my life in my own voice throughout, what a consolation that is, I have chosen at every moment my own destiny, which is to die here in the petrified garden" (138). As in Beckett, the appeal of an existential-historical realm of possibility, in which a palpable selfhood is hinted at, remains strong, even though the subject is never entirely free of the fear of arbitrariness or the depredations of irony. The field of affect, in other words, is never entirely eclipsed or neutralized by the field of language.

Coetzee's methods at this stage have something quite specific in common with the nouveau roman, namely, that the antirealist aesthetics of the movement were developed precisely in order to achieve a more "experiential" narration; for this reason the movement was also known as the nouveau realisme. As Ann Jefferson puts it, the "natural air of narrative is false because it does not give us the world as it is, or as we experience it, and so must be condemned for its lack of realism" (15). Coetzee's novel is in fact close in spirit to the Robbe-Grillet described by

Jameson, who argues that a socially critical Robbe-Grillet appears in Jealousy through an existentialist treatment of colonial relations ("Modernism and Its Repressed" 173).

Transgression and The Exposure of Boundaries

Strictly speaking, very little "happens" in Heart of the Country. Despite several episodes of parricide and burial, at the end of the novel Magda is still serving her father weak tea and changing his napkins. For the most part, what happens is an act of consciousness and an act of language; what historicizes this act, however, is that it is deeply transgressive. I have discussed transgression of another kind in the violence of Dusklands' s prose; here, transgression has a larger function that I shall explore with reference to insights drawn from anthropology. As Mary Douglas shows in Purity and Danger, taboos define the boundaries of legitimate social behavior; when they are broken, these boundaries are revealed, together with the social structures they are designed to hold in place. Magda's is a transgressive consciousness that reveals the structures of relationship and authority—with their accompanying pathologies—of the settler-colonial context. "Acting on myself I change the world," she says. "Where does this power end? Perhaps that is what I am trying to find out" (36).

Magda's transgressions make up the sequential episodes in the narrative structure, with one sequence leading logically to the next in a pattern of conceptual reversals. Through Magda the novel forces the social codes to light, exposing them to scrutiny in the public domain of reading. The first sequence (sections 1–37) involves the family, and the distinguishing feature of the family structure in the novel is the absence of the mother. As with so much else, we cannot establish the "truth" about this absence: Magda speculates about her mother's death in childbirth following the father's relentless sexual demands (2). What is significant is that the absence of the mother throws Magda and her father into a relationship which—from Magda's point of view —has Oedipal implications. "Wooed when we were little by our masterful fathers, we are bitter vestals, spoiled for life. The childhood rape: someone should study the kernel of truth in this fancy" (3).

Two sets of consequences arising from the family situation may be discussed in anthropological terms. The first is the strengthening of the father's role as the bearer of what Bronislaw Malinowski calls the

"principle of legitimacy" (59). "Legitimacy" here implies an identity and a name and provides a notion of order; thus, the father's role, in the absence of the mother, is to carry the historical destiny of the colonizer more deeply into Magda's consciousness of herself:

And mother, soft scented loving mother who drugged me with milk and slumber in the featherbed and then, to the sound of bells in the night, vanished, leaving me alone among rough hands and hard bodies—where are you? My lost world is a world of men, of cold nights, woodfire, gleaming eyes, and a long tale of dead heroes in a language I have not unlearned. (7)

This reflection is prompted by Magda's recalling how much of her childhood was spent in the company of servants, where "at the feet of an old man I have drunk in a myth of a past when beast and man and master lived a common life as innocent as the stars and the sky" (7). In contrast to this folkloric idyll, colonialism involves severance from the mother of a relatively homogeneous culture and a descent into an alien and divided world of pioneers. The family structure is therefore also an allegory of the situation mentioned in the introduction to White Writing, in which white South Africans, having thrown off political, cultural, and finally moral ties with Europe, "from being the dubious children of a far-off motherland, … graduated to uneasy possession of their own, less and less transigent internal colony" (11).

The second consequence of Magda's family situation is what has been called "libidinal withdrawal" (Slater 111). Libidinal withdrawal is usually censured because it undermines the establishment of exogamous relations. Magda calls herself one of the "melancholy spinsters" who are "lost to history" because she has no role to play in reproducing the history, through marriage, which her father represents. Being lost to history means that she does not have access to a subject-position that is inside the history-making self-representations offered by the father.^[12] His very possession of her, her entrapment, prevents such access; hence, "To my father I have been an absence all my life. Therefore instead of being the womanly warmth at the heart of this house I have been a zero, null, a vacuum towards which all collapses inward" (2).

When Magda opens the novel with the sentence "Today my father brought home his new bride," she does so from this vexed position. She is imagining the arrival of the bridal carriage because her father has been out courting, and she fears the worst—total displacement. Again, this is Magda's construction, but the truth it reveals is her sense of the position

that history has allotted to her. Every minor development in the account of the arrival of the new wife is governed by this perspective: the wife of Magda's fantasy cuts her loose from the only intimate relationship she has and the only social identity she knows—both provided by the father— so the house becomes a "house with rival mistresses" (7). The ontological questions Magda poses for herself are generated from within these fears; they provide a culturally localized, affective framework in which the existential issues are situated: "What are pain, jealousy, loneliness doing in the African night? Does a woman looking through a window into the dark mean anything? I stare out through a sheet of glass into a darkness that is complete, that lives in itself…. There is no act I know of that will liberate me into the world. There is no act I know of that will bring the world into me" (9–10).

The first act of parricide, which occurs in the middle of the sequence, is presented as an attempt to break out of this impasse. It comes when Magda sees herself as the bearer of her father's child, with the child becoming an "Antichrist of the desert" leading a Hottentot rebellion against a settler town. In the daydream the rebels are "shot to pieces" and she concludes: "Labouring under my father's weight I struggle to give life to a world but seem to engender only death" (10–11). The imaginary killing of the bridal couple in their bed is a desperate rebellion against this death kiss of the father, against the rule of what he and his history represent to her.

The second sequence (sections 38–162) brings out the pathological underside of the colonial family, the relationships of intimacy and exclusivity between masters and servants. A principle of equivalence is set up between the family of the farmhouse and that of Hendrik when he brings home his new bride, Klein-Anna (as Magda calls her), in a passage that mirrors the opening of the novel: "Six months ago Hendrik brought home his new bride. They came clip-clop across the flats in the donkey-cart, dusty after the long haul from Armoede" (17). This structure of equivalence creates tensions that can be described in terms of two scenarios, both of which form the substance of later narrative developments: first, Magda's father will be substituted for Hendrik in the servants' marriage, and second, partly as a reprisal, Hendrik will be substituted for the father in the quasi-incestuous relationship with Magda.

The first scenario, which is the substance of the sequence, breaks the bar against miscegenation, unlocking liminal apprehensions in Magda as she confronts her father's illicit desires. The act of parricide in this

sequence is the result of the father's breaking the rules rather than his representing them, as in the first instance; in other words, Magda rebels against both his duplicity and the duplicity of the conventions into which she has been socialized. Her imagination shows that exogamy as defined by the father involves parallel social structures that are supposed never to meet but that create the possibility, and indeed heighten the appeal, of easy sexual gratifications for men that are not ruled by institutionalized forms of exchange. (It is no wonder that Magda cannot take seriously the rituals of eyebrow plucking, tooth pulling, and fruit eating, though she contemplates them while staring in the mirror.) When Magda discovers this other world of illicit sexuality, she tries, in subsequent developments, to domesticate it by bringing Hendrik and KleinAnna to live in the house and by entering willingly into a liaison with Hendrik. The attempt is hopeless and she is raped—the divisions proving more consequential than she had at first imagined.

After recounting the arrival of Klein-Anna, Magda's discourse turns on various aspects of epistemology and colonial history that are worth noting for their emphasis on social relations. Hendrik comes from the nearby township of Armoede (literally, "Poverty"), which Magda has never seen but is able to invent (though with some foreboding of a general retribution); having described the familiar social geography of poverty, Magda then says that what keeps her going is her determination to get beyond the "names, names, names" that separate her from this world, "to burst through the screen of names into the goatseye view of Armoede and the stone desert" (17). Later she recounts a "speculative history" in which she imagines the dispossession of Hendrik's forebears and the arrival of the first merino sheep to provide the economic base for settlement. She goes on to construct a dialogue in which Hendrik appeals for work at the farm: "'Wat se soort werk soek jy?' 'Nee,werk, my baas"' ("'What kind of work do you want?' 'No, just work, boss'";20).

The use of Afrikaans is significant, because it implies a sociallyspecific referencing whose most prominent features are later describedby Magda after a similar dialogue with Klein-Anna: "A language ofnuances, of supple word-order and delicate particles, opaque to theoutsider, dense, to its children, with moments of solidarity, moments ofdistance" (30).

Magda's reflections, in the same sequence, on the relationship betweendesire and language also place social relations at the center:"Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire.Desire is rapture, not exchange. It is only by alienating desire that

language masters it…. The frenzy of desire in the medium of words yields the mania of the catalogue" (26). Language is a social medium and a medium of exchange; desire is not—it is possession. This recognition underlies Magda's subsequent claim that she can represent sexuality: "How do I, a lonely spinster, come to know such things? It is not for nothing that I spend evenings humped over the dictionary." Words, the claim goes, can substitute for desire or serve as a defense against it. Her father has no such defense, but as a "dealer in signs," she has: "I pick up and sniff and describe and drop, moving from one item to the next, numbering the universe steadily with my words; but what weapons has he with which to keep at bay the dragons of desire?" (27). Similarly, because the language the father and Klein-Anna use in their lovemaking is public—"There is no private language. Their jy is my jy too" (35)— Magda feels that the rules of discourse on the farm will never be the same: "Whatever they may say to each other, even in the closest dead of night, they say in common words, unless they gibber like apes. How can I speak to Hendrik as before when they corrupt my speech?" (35).

Poised in this imaginative space, where, anticipating miscegenation, she is allowing the boundaries of knowledge and custom to be perforated on all sides, Magda undertakes some of her most intense ontological speculation. She makes recurring efforts to imagine herself as existing outside of human society, in what she calls her former state of "unthinking animal integrity" (40): she thinks of herself variously as "a thin black beetle with dummy wings who lays no eggs and blinks in the sun" (18); a snake "licking the eggslime off herself before taking her bearings and crawling off to this farmhouse to take up residence behind the wainscot" (38); or a black widow spider that would hide in a corner and "engulf whoever passes in my venom" (39). Still more poignantly, she sees herself inhabiting a world outside of consciousness altogether, the Sartrean being-in-itself: "This is what I was meant to be: a poetess of interiority, an explorer of the inwardness of stones, the emotions of ants, the consciousness of the thinking parts of the brain. It seems to be the only career, if we except death, for which life in the desert has fitted me" (35).

A related area of concentration in the sequence is her sense of an internalized absence of meaning. Although she has been "used as a tool" to run a farmhouse, she has another sense of herself "as a sheath, as a matrix, as protectrix of a vacant inner space" (41). Unlike her father, who appears like "a knifeblade cutting the wind, or a tower with eyes," she is "a hole with a body draped around it": "I am a hole crying to be

whole" (41). The terminology is here is again specifically Sartrean; in the Achterberg essay Coetzee cites the description of consciousness in Being and Nothingness as "a hole through which nothingness pours into the world" (287). He also quotes Wallace Stevens's Nanzia Nunzio in terms that approximate Magda's condition: "I am the woman stripped more nakedly / Than nakedness … / Speak to me that, which spoken, will array me" (286).

Lacking such reciprocity, however, Magda's sense of self has to be created by autosuggestion, and her constructions bear out Coetzee's observations that "All versions of the I are fictions of the I. The primal I is not recoverable…. Indeed, after the experience of the Word in relation to one's existence, life cannot go on as before" (288). Producing fictions of the self from the image of a "hole," Magda concocts a "bucolic comedy" in which she features as wife to a farmer and mother to "a litter of ratlike, runty girls, all the spit image of myself, scowling into the sun, tripping over their own feet, identically dressed in bottlegreen smocks and snubnosed black shoes" (42). Alternatively, she imagines herself a high-minded defender of the feudal codes her father is busy destroying (43). Neither of these fictions is sustained very long, however, for she also sees herself hiding away in such constructions, in a passage that recalls the protective aspect of the labyrinth in Dusklands:

It is the hermit crab, I remember from a book, that as it grows migrates from one empty shell to another. The grim moralist with the fiery sword is only a stopping place, a little less temporary than the wild woman of the veld who talks to her friends the insects and walks in the midday sun, but temporary all the same. Whose shell I presently skulk in does not matter, it is the shell of a dead creature. What matters is that my anxious softbodied self should have a refuge from the predators of the deep. (43–44)

A related attempt at self-preservation lies in Magda's efforts to create a story with "a beginning, a middle, and an end" (43). Her stories, which use the abandoned schoolhouse as a point of departure and involve a childhood with brothers and sisters learning together the rudiments of culture from a schoolmistress, are laced with arbitrariness.^[13] The siblings quickly turn into horrible stepbrothers and stepsisters who ostracize her; one of them, "Arthur," is remembered as most beloved, although Magda explains that in fact he, too, showed her nothing but indifference. Magda's story gradually descends into collective culture, becoming steadily depersonalized in its association with fairy tales, such as the story of the Ugly Duckling, and the Arthurian legends. Later Magda will

also reject psychological explanations of her condition, another form of storytelling, noting finally that all depends on the "old cold black wind that blows from nowhere to nowhere out of me endlessly" (64).

The Recovery of Temporality

Following the second parricide, in which Magda shoots her father clumsily through the window of the bedroom where he is making love to Klein-Anna, there are significant changes of narrative construction. Beginning in the second and developing in the third and fourth sequences, these changes involve, first, a dramatization of what Magda calls a changed "field of moral tensions," in which she has to rely on the servants' complicity in the murder, thus drawing them into an uncommon intimacy of shared knowledge and secrecy; this intimacy is taken further in Magda's decision to bring them into the house. Second, Magda senses that she is losing her grasp of time. The disorientation begins when she says: "A day must have intervened here. Where there is a blank there must have been a day during which my father sickened irrecoverably, and during which Hendrik and Klein-Anna made their peace" (79). The disorientation will eventually involve the recovery of a more conventional sense of time as the novel moves toward closure.

Indeed, Coetzee increasingly allows the passage of time to pressurize Magda. She begins to live "more and more intermittently," with blocks of time going missing. "Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me" (80). In the third sequence (sections 163–229) days are marked by sunsets and mornings, and the calendar makes an appearance for the first time, in the use of days of the week. There are also shifts of tense from present to past and back as Magda tries to regain her sense of the continuity of incident (114–15). Thus, Magda begins to lose her exclusive hold on the time of her fictive constructions—on the narrative perspective, that is, and the way time is controlled within it. At the simplest level this loss of control is apparent in her rising panic over the burial of her father after visitors have come to the farm; in a similar vein, Hendrik demands payment, and a boy arrives with a message demanding payment of taxes. Whereas in the opening sequence Magda's perspective on her father's desires determined the way time was represented, now Hendrik and the boy serve as additional agents of temporality.

Magda's loss of control over the narrative perspective and the selfaffirming actions of Hendrik are, of course, thematically related. Coet-

zee is careful to repeat the rape sequence several times, thus denying it the status of an "event" and establishing it as a colonial fantasy on Magda's part, but it does suggest that Magda's is not the only history to be taken into account. The ghostly, ultimate referents of this act would seem to be decolonization and nationalism, registered obliquely through Magda's fears. Her efforts to get close to Klein-Anna, the rape itself, and subsequent fumblings over sexual partnership with Hendrik all ultimately fail, painful though they are: "There has been no transfiguration," she says. "What I long for, whatever it is, does not come" (113). Writing in the wake of the Soweto Revolt, Coetzee chooses to stress Magda's failure to transcend her alienation. Speaking of both Jacobus Coetzee and Magda, Coetzee said in an interview in 1978 that they "lack the stature to transform [the] 'It' into a 'You,' to, so to speak, create a society in which reciprocity exists; and therefore condemn themselves to desperate gestures towards establishing intimacy" ("Speaking" 23).

This sense of failure in Heart of the Country leads logically to the fourth and final sequence (sections 230–66), in which Magda displaces her efforts to achieve reciprocity to the realm of myth. The first sign that she intends giving up on the very possibility of human exchange, after Hendrik and Klein-Anna have abandoned the farm, comes when Magda frightens off the boy with the message about taxes. The child brings to mind the boy who appears at the end of each act of Waiting for Godot, claiming to have a message from Godot himself. The connection would imply that Magda is helpless before the demands of history and imprisoned in her own desires. Her need for community remains constant, however, to the extent that she speaks of a castaway who loses his mind because there is no one to talk back to him: "It is not speech that makes man man but the speech of others" (125). Her communion with the sky-gods is a substitute for this human communication and an attempt to find a language not mediated by social division.

The logic of the final sequence, perhaps even some of its stylistic ebullience, resembles Coetzee's description in the Achterberg essay of Buber's treatment of I and You:

The existential incompleteness of the I is at the root of Martin Buber's myth of a primal I-Thou relation. The "primary word," says Buber, is not I but "I-Thou, " the word of "natural combination" denoting a relation between I and You antedating the objectification of You into It and the isolation of I into being "at times more ghostly than the dead and the moon." This primal relation is, however, lost: "This is the exalted melancholy of our fate, that every Thou in our world must become an It. " Intimations of the lost relation,

"moments of the Thou … strange lyric and dramatic episodes, seductive and magical, … tearing us away to dangerous extremes, … shattering security," inspire our efforts to reconstitute again and again the "between" of the primal I-Thou. (286)

Magda's efforts to communicate with the sky-gods involve an attempt to recover the "lost relation," though her failure is social and historical, rather than the result of the fallenness of humanity. The "aeroplanes" carrying the sky-gods ("narrow silver pencils with two pairs of rigid wings, a long pair in front and a short pair behind"; 126) would seem to confirm this sense of failure before history, for although Coetzee is not concerned with the realistic depiction of period, the airplanes are startlingly anachronistic, so that Magda appears "lost to history" in a rather ordinary sense, too, like a prisoner who does not know that the war is over.

The language of "pure meaning" (125) uttered by the sky-gods is a metaphysical discourse reflecting on the insecurity Magda has demonstrated throughout the novel. Here Coetzee reconstructs lines of argument from Hegel and Sartre that deal with the problem of the presence of the subject to itself, the emergence of being-for-itself through separation and negation, and the dialectic of self and Other. Having been spoken to out of the sky, Magda —to the very end seeking transfiguration through recognition —speaks back, first by shouting skyward and then by placing stones on the veld. "ES MI," she appeals; "VENE!" (130). Later, fearing that the sky-gods will disregard her, treating her as one of the ugly sisters instead of Cinderella herself, she writes, "CINDRLA ES MI" (132). Apprehensive about the gods' superior sophistication, she writes cryptic and alluring poems ("POEMAS CREPUSCLRS"; 132), adding a line each day that the airplanes fly, each line implying invitation, reassurance, or conciliation. In the end, in pure frustration, she resorts to vulgar come-ons; transcendence, in whatever form, proves to be unavailable: "We are the castaways of God as we are the castaways of history," she says finally (135).

In the closing paragraphs Magda returns to her father's side and falls momentarily into a mode of nostalgia in which she constructs the full life she has in fact been unable to achieve for herself. It is a moment of painful bad faith, but Coetzee does not leave Magda in this condition; instead, he allows her to articulate some of the formal and generic conditions that have made her what she is. She imagines herself in another life, in a domestic metropolitan novel, where she might have

made up for "physical shortcomings" with "ten nimble fingers on the pianoforte keys and an album full of sonnets" (138). Realizing that the novel of class relations and marriage markets was never available to her, she asks what kind of literature is it that speaks of life on "a barbarous frontier," "in a district outside the law, where the bar against incest is often down, where we pass our days in savage torpor?" (138) One possible answer, she muses, is a pastoral literature in which there are poems about "Verlore Vlakte, about the melancholy of the sunset over the koppies, the sheep beginning to huddle against the first evening chill, the faraway boom of the windmill, the first chirrup of the first cricket" (138). Magda acknowledges that she is not immune to the pastoral idyll but declares finally that she is content to have "uttered my life in my own voice throughout," to have "chosen at every moment her own destiny" (138).

It is not entirely true that she has done so, since, as we have seen, historical processes overwhelm her, but in contrast to the literature of pastoralism in which the alienation and insecurity of the settler are soothed, Magda has certainly explored and revealed the moral and social texture of her situation. Her particular gift has been her transgressiveness, which leaves its outline over social conventions and lines of division; but to that one might add her gift of negativity, her refusal to be seduced by the attractions of losing oneself to the dream of being simply present to oneself and one's history. I have chosen, she says,

to die here in the petrified garden, behind locked gates, near my father's bones, in a space echoing with hymns I could have written but did not because (I thought) it was too easy. (138)