Acts of cruelty

I HAVE been patiently working my way through J.M. Coetzee's oeuvre in an attempt to acquaint myself fully with this extraordinary writer's work. This week, I will look at his first work, Duskslands (Vintage), published when the author was in his mid-thirties (he is now 60). That leaves four novels, In The Heart Of The Country, Foe, Age Of Iron and The Master Of Petersburg (according to the writer, Githa Hariharan, a friend of his, the last one is an exceptional work) I shall hope to have ready by the end of the year. But to return to Dusklands:

It comprises two long narratives, both told in the first person, and in both of which the author makes an appearance rather like Paul Auster uses himself as a character in his great first book, The New York trilogy. The first long narrative purports to be something called "The Vietnam Project", a diabolical scheme concocted by the resident mavens at Psy Ops to win the war in Indo-China. The author of the narrative is being supervised by someone called Coetzee, whom he loathes, fears and admires. In between ramblings about his supervisor, he constructs a nightmare scenario that gives new meaning to psychological cruelty and man's inhumanity to man. However accomplished, the first narrative did not really hold my interest, being obscure and overwritten and altogether too fanciful.

The second narrative (ostensibly an 18th Century memoir of an ancestor of the author) more than makes up for the inadequacies of the first. The narrative is divided into three parts - a first person account by Jacobus Coetzee himself, edited, with an afterword by J. M. Coetzee's father, S. J. Coetzee, and translated by the author.

Although Dusklands is labelled a work of fiction by the publishers, in a preface to the second narrative, J. M. Coetzee states that he has translated a 1951 edition, entitled Het relaas van Jacobus Coetzee, Janszoon, that was published by his father, the late Dr. S. J. Coetzee, for the van Plettenberg society. This would seem to suggest that the first of the three parts of the narrative is non-fiction, a memoir authored by a living person. I have no means of confirming this or whether the "memoir" of Jacobus Coetzee is a fiction, and all the apparatus supporting it, an elaborate literary device.

Whatever it is, it works and works brilliantly. The apparatus I am referring to is the Afterword to Jacobus Coetzee's narrative prepared by J. M. Coetzee's father, and an appendix, that is Jacobus' official deposition about his 1760 expedition, in the course of which he brought back to the outside world, the first news of the giraffe, among other things.

The three sequences read together are a frightening testimonial to the brutality man is able to visit on his fellow beings in the name of bringing civilisation to primitive savages.

Jacobus Janszoon Coetzee is the grandson of Dirk Coetzee, a Burgher "who emigrated from Holland to the Cape in 1976". He is a dull, plodding man who decides to venture into the hinterland in search of ivory and whatever other fortune he might find, accompanied by his faithful Hottentot servants. Coetzee is a fanatical believer in Christianity, which he believes separates the civilised from the sub-human, but is otherwise a tough, pragmatic pioneer who survives in a harsh country by a mixture of shrewdness, unquestioning self-belief and heroic feats of endurance. He is capable of the most bestial cruelty, if his memoir is to be believed, wreaking ruthless vengeance on the innocent Great Namqua people whose lands he violates, his untrustworthy servants whom he kills out of hand, and a single faithful follower, whom he abandons to his fate as soon as he becomes a liability.

Jacobus Coetzee's doings, as described by himself, make him a fit case for capital punishment in the slowest, most painful way possible, but he does not, of course, see himself in that light. As he writes: "What did the deaths of all these people achieve? Through their deaths I, who after they had expelled me, had wandered the desert like a pallid symbol, against which asserted my reality. No more than any other man do I enjoy killing, but 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. All are guilty, without exception, I include the Hottentots. Who knows for what unimaginable crimes of the spirit they died, through me? God's judgment is just, irreprehensible, and incomprehensible. His mercy pays no heed to merit. I am a tool in the hands of history ...."

After reading Dusklands I am more than ever convinced that J. M. Coetzee is one of the greatest living writers we have. His account of the lunatic Jacobus Coetzee is another feather in his Tyrolean hat.

DAVID DAVIDAR

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