Coetzee Excerpts

[Andrew Dinn]

Foax,

Appended are two quotes from Coetzee's Dusklands stories, `The Vietnam
Project' and `The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee'. These are the ones I
tried to link to Pynchon in my last note on Coetzee. See for yourself.


Andrew Dinn
-----------
And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
To the rushing water speak:  I am.

----- 8< -------- 8< -------- 8< -------- 8< -------- 8< -------- 8< ---

Dusklands Penguin pbk 1983 page 17

The brothers of men who stood out against proven tortures and died
holding their silence are now broken down with drugs and a little
clever confusion. They talk freely, holding their interrogators' hands
and opening their hearts like children. After they have talked they go
to hospital, and then to rehabilitation. They are easily picked out in
the camps. They are the ones who hide in corners or walk up and down
the fences all day pattering to themselves. Their eyes are closed to
the world by a wall of what may be tears. They are ghosts or absences
of themselves: where they had once been is now only a black hole
through which they have been sucked. They wash themselves and fell
dirty. Something is floating up from their bowels and voiding itself
endlessly in the grey space in their head. Their memory is numb. They
know only that there was a rupture, in time, in space, I use my words,
that they are here, now, in the after, that from somewhere they are
being waved to.

These poisoned bodies, mad floating people of the camps, who had been
-- let me say it -- the finest of their generation, courageous,
fraternal -- it is they who are the occasion of all my woe! Why could
they not accept us? We could have loved them: our hatred for them grew
only out of our broken hopes. We brought them our pitiable selves,
trembling on the edge of inexistence, and asked only that they
acknowledge us. We brought with us weapons, the gun and its metaphors,
the only copulas we knew of between ourselves and our objects. From
this tragic ignorance we sought deliverance. Our nightmare was that
since whatever we reached for slipped like smoke through our fingers,
we did not exist; that since whatever we embraced wilted, we were all
that existed. We landed on the shores of Vietnam clutching our arms
and pleading for someone to stand up without flinching to these probes
of reality: if you will prove yourself, we shouted, you will prove us
too, and we will love you endlessly and shower you with gifts.

But like everything else they withered before us. We bathed them in
seas of fire, praying for the miracle. In the heart of the flame their
bodies glowed with heavenly light; in our ears their voices rang; but
when the fire died they were only ash. We lined them up in ditches. If
they had walked toward us singing through the bullets we would have
knelt and worshipped; but the bullets knocked them over and they died
as we had feared. We cut their flesh open, we reached into their dying
bodies, tearing out their livers, hoping to be washed in their blood;
but they screamed and gushed like our most negligible phantoms. We
forced ourselves deeper than we had ever gone before into their women;
but when we came back we were still alone, and the women like stones.

>From tears we grew exasperated. Having proved to our sad selves that
these were not the dark-eyed gods who walk our dreams, we wished only
that they would retire and leave us in peace. They would not. For a
while we were prepared to pity them, though we pitied more our tragic
reach for transcendence. then we ran out of pity.

ibid page 80

The instrument of survival in the wild is the gun, but the need for it
is metaphysical rather than physical. The native tribes have survived
without the gun. I too could survive in the wilderness armed with only
bow and arrow, did I not fear that so deprived I woud perish not of
hunger but of the disease of the spirit that drives the caged baboon
to evacuate its entrails. Now that the gun has arrived among them the
native tribes are doomed, not only because the gun will kill them in
large numbers but because the yearning for it will alienate them from
the wilderness. Every territory through which I march with my gun
becomes a territory cast loose from the past and bound to the future.

...

Savages do not have guns. this is the effective meaning of savagery,
which we may define as enslavement to space, as one speaks obversely
of the explorer's mastery of space. The relation of master and savage
is a spatial relation. The African highland is flat, the approach of
the savage across space continuous. From the fringes of the horizon he
approaches, growing to manhood beneath my eyes until he reaches the
verge of that precarious zone in which, invulnerable to his weapons, I
command his life. Across this annulus I behold him approach bearing
the wilderness in his heart. On the far side he is nothing to me and I
probably nothing to him. On the near side mutual fear will drive us to
our little comedies of man and man, prospector and guide, benefactor
and beneficiary, victim and assassin, teacher and pupil, father and
child. He crosses it, however, in none of these characters but as
representative of that out there which my eye once enfolded and
ingested and which now promises to enfold, ingest and project me
through itself as a speck on a field which we may call annihilation or
alternatively history. He threatens to have a history in which I shall
be a term. Such is the material basis of the malady of the master's
soul. So often, waking or dreaming has his soul lived through the
approach of the savage that this has become an ideal form of the life
of penetration.