Dusklands
J. M. Coetzee
PENGUIN BOOKS
DUSKLANDS
J. M. COETZEE was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Disgrace, Youth, Summertime, and The Childhood of Jesus. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice. He lives in Australia.
BY J. M. COETZEE
FICTION
Dusklands
In the Heart of the Country
Waiting for the Barbarians
Life & Times of Michael K
Foe
Age of Iron
The Master of Petersburg
Boyhood
The Lives of Animals
Disgrace
Youth
Elizabeth Costello
Slow Man
Diary of a Bad Year
Summertime
The Childhood of Jesus
NONFICTION
White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa
Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews
Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship
Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986–1999
The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 2003
Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000–2005
Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011 (with Paul Auster)
The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (with Arabella Kurtz)
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
First published in South Africa by Ravan Press (Pty) Ltd 1974
First published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1982
Published in Penguin Books (UK) 1983
Published in Penguin Books (USA) 1985
This edition published in Penguin Books (USA) 1996
Copyright © 1974, 1982 by J. M. Coetzee
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Ebook ISBN 9781524705558
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: Paul Buckley
Cover images: (Skyraider dropping bombs over Vietnam) Bettmann / Getty Images; (bushmen) Eric Lafforgue / Getty Images
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Contents
About the Author
By J. M. Coetzee
Title Page
Copyright
The Vietnam Project
The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee
THE VIETNAM PROJECT
Obviously it is difficult not to sympathize 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.
Herman Kahn
My name is Eugene Dawn. I cannot help that. Here goes.
One
Coetzee has asked me to revise my essay. It sticks in his craw: he wants it blander, otherwise he wants it eliminated. He wants me out of the way too, I can see it. I am steeling myself against this powerful, genial, ordinary man, so utterly without vision. I fear him and despise his blindness. I deserved better. Here I am under the thumb of a manager, a type before whom my first instinct is to crawl. I have always obeyed my superiors and been glad to do so. I would not have embarked on the Vietnam Project if I had guessed it was going to bring me into conflict with a superior. Conflict brings unhappiness, unhappiness poisons existence. I cannot stand unhappiness, I need peace and love and order for my work. I need coddling. I am an egg that must lie in the downiest of nests under the most coaxing of nurses before my bald, unpromising shell cracks and my shy secret life emerges. Allowances must be made for me. I brood, I am a thinker, a creative person, one not without value to the world. I would have expected more understanding from Coetzee, who should be used to handling creative people. Once upon a time a creative person himself, he is now a failed creative person who lives vicariously off true creative people. He has built a reputation on the work of other people. Here he has been put in charge of the New Life Project knowing nothing about Vietnam or about life. I deserve better.
I am apprehensive about tomorrow’s confrontation. I am bad at confrontations. My first impulse is to give in, to embrace my antagonist and concede all in the hope that he will love me. Fortunately I despise my impulses. Married life has taught me that all concessions are mistakes. Believe in yourself and your opponent will respect you. Cling to the mast, if that is the metaphor. People who believe in themselves are worthier of love than people who doubt themselves. People who doubt themselves have no core. I am doing my best to fashion a core for myself, late though it be in life.
I must pull myself together. I believe in my work. I am my work. For a year now the Vietnam Project has been the center of my existence. I do not intend to be cut off prematurely. I will have my say. For once I must be prepared to stand up for myself.
I must not underestimate Coetzee.
He called me into his office this morning and sat me down. He is a hearty man, the kind that eats steak daily. Smiling, he paced his floor, thinking up an opening, while I, swivelling right and left, did my best to point my face toward him. I refused his offer of coffee. He is the kind of man who drinks coffee, I the kind who with caffeine in his veins begins to quiver and make euphoric commitments.
Say nothing which you may later regret.
I wore my straight shoulders and bold gaze for the interview. Coetzee may know that I am hunched and shifty—I cannot help these eyes—but I wished to signal him that today I was formally accreting myself around the bold and the true. (Since pubertal collapse all postures have sat uneasily on me. However, there is no behavior that cannot be learned. I have high hopes for an integrated future.)
Coetzee spoke. In a series of compliments whose ambiguity was never less than naked he blighted the fruit of a year’s work. I will not pretend that I cannot construe his speech word for word.
“I never imagined that this department would one day be producing work of an avant-garde nature”, he said. “I must commend you. I enjoyed reading your first chapters. You write well. It will be a pleasure to be associated with so well-finished a piece of research.
“Which is not to say”, he continued, “of course, that everyone has to agree with what you say. You are working in a novel and contentious field and must expect contention.
“I didn’t ask you to drop by, however, to discuss the substance of your report, in which—let me repeat it—you say some important things which our contractors are going to have to seriously think about.
“What I would like to do, rather, is to make some suggestions regarding presentation. I make these suggestions only because I have had a certain amount of experience in writing and supervising reports on D.O.D. projects. Whereas—correct me if I am wrong—this is the first time round for you”.
&n
bsp; He is going to reject me. He fears vision, has no sympathy for passion or despair. Power speaks only to power. Sentences are queueing behind his neat red lips. I will be dismissed, and dismissed according to form. A certain configuration of his mouth and nose so subtle as to be perceptible only to me tells me that the hectic toxins chasing in my blood and wafted in my sweat afflict his expensive senses with distaste. I glare. I am striving to strike down with my lightning-bolt a man who does not believe in magic. If I fail I will settle for a home among the placid specialists in control and self-control. My eyes flash a series of pleas and threats so rapid as to be perceptible only to me, and to him.
“As you know from your dealings with them, the military are, as a class—to put it frankly—slow-thinking, suspicious, and conservative. Convincing them of something new is never easy. Yet these are the people you have finally to convince of the justness of your recommendations. Take my word, you will not succeed if you speak over their heads. Nor will you succeed if you approach them in the spirit of absoluteness, of intellectual ferocity, that you find in our internal debate here at Kennedy. We understand the conventions of the intellectual duel, they don’t: they feel an attack as an attack, probably an attack on their whole class.
“So what I would like you to do, first of all, before we talk over anything else, is to set to work revising the tone of your argument. I want you to rewrite your proposals so that people in the military can entertain them without losing self-respect. Keep this in mind: if you say that they don’t know their jobs (which is probably true), that they don’t understand what they are doing (which is certainly true), then they have no choice but to throw you out the window. Whereas if you stress continually, not only explicitly but through the very genuflexions of your style, that you are merely a functionary with a narrow if significant specialism, a near-academic with none of the soldier’s all-round understanding of the science of warfare; that, nevertheless, within the narrow boundaries of your specialism you have some suggestions to offer which may have some strategic fallout—then, you will find, your proposals will get a hearing.
“If you haven’t seen Kidman’s little book on Central America, look at it. It’s the best example I know of self-effacing persuasion.
“There is one more thing I would like you to think about. As you must know, you carry out your analysis of the propaganda services in terms which are alien to most people. This applies not only to your work but to the work of everyone in the Mythography section. For my part I find mythography fascinating, and I think it has a great future. But don’t you perhaps misread your audience? I get the odd impression, going over your essay, that it is written for my eyes. Well, you will find your real audience a much ruder crew. Let me suggest, therefore, some kind of introduction in which you explain in words of one syllable the kind of procedure you follow—how myths operate in human society, how signs are exchanged, and so forth; with lots of examples and for God’s sake no footnotes”.
My fingers curl and clench in the palms of my hands, where they grow puffed and dull. As I write this moment I catch my left fist clenching. Charlotte Wolff calls it a sign of depression (The Psychology of Gesture), but she cannot be right: I do not at this moment feel depressed, being engaged in a liberating creative act. Nevertheless Charlotte Wolff, when she speaks on gesture, speaks with authority, therefore I am careful to create opportunities for my fingers to busy themselves. While I am reading, for example, I conscientiously flex and unflex them; and when I talk to people I keep my hands conspicuously relaxed, even to the point of letting them droop.
I notice, however, that my toes have taken to curling into the soles of my feet. I wonder whether other people, Coetzee for instance, have noticed it. Coetzee is the kind of man who notices symptoms. As a manager he has probably sat through a one-week seminar on the interpretation of gesture.
If I stamp out the gesture at the level of my feet, where will it migrate next?
I am also unable to rid myself of the habit of stroking my face. Charlotte disapproves of this tic, which she says betokens anxiety. I keep my fingers from my face (I pick my nose too) by an effort of the will, on important occasions. People tell me that I am too intense, people, that is to say, who think they have reached the stage of confidences with me; but if the truth be told I am intense only because my will is concentrated on subduing spasms in the various parts of my body, if spasm is not too dramatic a word. I am vexed by the indiscipline of my body. I have often wished I had another one.
It is unpleasant to have your productions rejected, doubly unpleasant if they are rejected by one you admire, trebly unpleasant if you are used to adulation. I was always a clever child, a good child and a clever child. I ate my beans, which were good for me, and did my homework. I was seen and not heard. Everyone praised me. It is only recently that I have begun to falter. It has been a bewildering experience, though, being possessed of a high degree of consciousness, I have never been unprepared for it. At the moment when one ceases to be the pupil, I have told myself, at the moment when one starts to strike out for oneself, one must expect one’s teachers to feel betrayed and to strike back in envy. The petty reaction of Coetzee to my essay is to be expected in a bureaucrat whose position is threatened by an up-and-coming subordinate who will not follow the slow, well-trodden path to the top. He is the old bull, I the young bull.
This consoling thought does not however make his insults any the easier to swallow. He is in power over me. I need his approval. I will not pretend that he cannot hurt me. I would prefer his love to his hatred. Disobedience does not come easily to me.
I have begun to work on my Introduction. I do the creative part in the mornings; afternoons I spend with my authorities in the basement of the Harry S. Truman Library. There, among the books, I sometimes catch myself in a state not far from happiness, the highest happiness, intellectual happiness (we in mythography are of that cast). The basement (in fact the sub-basement, a stage in the downward expansion of the library) is reached via a spiral stairway and an echoing tunnel plated in battleship-gray. It holds Dewey classes 100–133, unpopular among Truman’s clientele. The racks run on rails for compactness. The four security cameras that oversee the basement can be evaded in blind spots in the shifting aisles; in these blind spots one of the assistants, a girl whose name I do not know, flirts, if that is the word, with my friend the basement stack attendant. I disapprove, and take the trouble to radiate disapproval from my little carrel, but the girl does not care and Harry knows no better. I disapprove not because I am a killjoy but because she is making a fool of Harry. Harry is a microcephalic. He loves his work; I would not like to see him get into trouble. He is brought to the library in the mornings and fetched home in the evenings in an unmarked Order of Our Lady the Virgin microbus. He is himself a harmless virgin and likely to die so. He uses the blind spots to masturbate in.
My relations with Harry are entirely satisfying. He loves the shelves to be in order and resents, I see from his headshakes, people who take down books. Therefore when I take books from the shelves I am careful to mollify him by putting regulation green slips in them and arranging them neatly on the shelf above my carrel. Then I smile at him, and he grins back. I like to think, too, that the tasks I steep myself in in the afternoons are such as he would approve of if he understood. I make extracts, check references, compile lists, do sums. Perhaps, seeing the neat script-strings that issue from my pen, seeing my orderly books and papers, my quiet white-shirted back, Harry knows, in his way, that I can be admitted to his stacks without fear. I am sorry there is no more of him in my story.
I am unfortunately unable to carry on creative work in the library. My creative spasm comes only in the early hours of the morning when the enemy in my body is too sleepy to throw up walls against the forays of my brain. The Vietnam report 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. None of this is
reflected in the report itself. When I have duties to fulfil I fulfil them.
My carrel in the library is gray, with a gray bookrack and a little gray drawer for stationery. My office at the Kennedy Institute is also gray. Gray desks and fluorescent lighting: 1950’s functionalism. I have toyed with the idea of complaining but cannot think of a way of doing so without opening myself to counterattack. Hardwoods are for the managers. So I grind my teeth and suffer. Gray planes, the shadowless green light under which like a pale stunned deep-sea fish I float, seep into the grayest centres of memory and drown me in reveries of love and hatred for that self of mine who exhausted the fire of his twenty-third, twenty-fourth, and twenty-fifth years beneath the fluorescent glare of Datamatic longing in dying periods for 5 PM with its ambiguous hesperian promise.
The lights of Harry S. Truman hum in their reserved, fatherly way. The temperature is 72. Hemmed in with walls of books, I should be in paradise. But my body betrays me. I read, my face starts to lose its life, a stabbing begins in my head, then, as I beat through gales of yawns to fix my weeping eyes on the page, my back begins to petrify in the scholar’s hook. The ropes of muscle that spread from the spine curl in suckers around my neck, over my clavicles, under my armpits, across my chest. Tendrils creep down legs and arms. Clamped round my body this parasite starfish dies in rictus. Its tentacles grow brittle. I straighten my back and hear bands creak. Behind my temples too, behind my cheekbones, behind my lips the glacier creeps inward toward its epicenter behind my eyes. My eyeballs ache, my mouth constricts. If this inner face of mine, this vizor of muscle, had features, they would be the monstrous troglodyte features of a man who bunches his sleeping eyes and mouth as a totally unacceptable dream forces itself into him. From head to foot I am the subject of a revolting body. Only the organs of my abdomen keep their blind freedom: the liver, the pancreas, the gut, and of course the heart, squelching against one another like unborn octuplets.
