"J. M. COETZEE'S VISION GOES TO THE NERVE CENTER OF BEING."

NADINE GORDIMER

 A shattering pair of novellas in the tradition of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Dusklands probes the link between the powerful and powerless. "Vietnam Project" is narrated by a researcher investigating the effectiveness of United States propaganda and psychological warfare in Vietnam. The question of power is also explored in "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," the story of an eighteenth-century Boer frontiersman who vows revenge on the Hottentot natives because they have failed to treat him with the respect that he thinks a white man deserves.

With striking intensity, J. M. Coetzee penetrates the twilight land of obsession, charting the nature of colonization as it seeks, in 1970 as in 1760, to absorb  the wilds into the Western dusklands.

"Intense, clear, and powerful. The promise, so brilliantly fulfilled in his later work, is clear in this earliest novel."-Daily Telegraph (London)

"His writing gives off whiffs of Conrad, of Nabokov, of Golding, of the Paul Theroux of The Mosquito Coast. But he is none of these, he is a harsh, compelling new voice." -Sunday Times (London)

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The Vietnam Project 

Obviously it is difficult not to sympathize with those European and American audiences who, when shown films of fighter-bomber pilots vissibly 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
 

1.31 Western theory and Vietnamese practice. But the voice which our broadcasting projects into Vietnamese homes is the voice of neither father nor brother. It is the voice of the doubting self, the voice of Rene Descartes driving his wedge between the self in the world and the self who contemplates that self. The voices of our Chieu Hoi (surrender/reconciliation) programming are wholly Cartesian. Their record is not a happy one. Whether disguised as the voice of the doubting secret self ("Why should I fight when the struggle is hopeless?") or as that of the clever brother ("I have gone over to Saigon-so can you!"), they have failed because they speak out of an alienated doppelganger rationality for which there is no precedent in Vietnamese thought. We attempt to embody the ghost inside the villager, but there has never been any ghost there …

The propaganda of Radio Free Vietnam, crude though it may seem with its martial music, boasts and slogans, exhortations and anathema, is closer to the pulse of Vietnam than our subtler programming of division. It offers strong authority and a simple choice. Our own statistics show that everywhere except in Saigon itself Radio Free Vietnam is the most favored listening. The Saigonese prefer U.S. Armed Forces Radio for its pop music. Our figures for Liberation Radio (NLF) indicate a small listenership but are probably unreliable. Figures for the U.S.-run services are more accurate and indicate low interest everywhere except in the cities. The provincial population listens with respect to the ferocious war-heroes, humble defectors, and brass-band disk-jockeys of Radio Free Vietnam. There is an early-evening commentary program run by Nguyen Loc Binh, a colonel in the National Police, which draws an enormous audience. Westerners are distressed by Nguyen's crudity, but the Vietnamese like him because with rough humor, cajolements, threats, and a certain slyness of insight he has worked up a typically Vietnamese elder-brother relationship with his audience, particularly with women.