COETZEE, J.M. Dusklands. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. 1974.
8vo. Original grey cloth lettered in gilt to spine, in the dustwrapper reproducing a watercolour painting of Namaqualand attributed to Thomas Baines (1820-75); pp. [10], 134; a few small scattered spots of discolouration to cloth, horizontal ink mark (c. 3 cm) to upper edge of half title, light adhesive residue to upper and lower edges of half title and rear endpaper, a few light spots to fore-edge, dustwrapper lightly toned, a touch rubbed to spine tips and corners, neat bookseller’s label to front endpaper verso (Adams & Co. Ltd, Durban); a sound, near fine copy.
First edition of Coetzee’s first novel, in which “we visit the dead souls of the explorers, conquistadors, and administrators whose work it is, in 1970 as in 1760, to absorb the wilds into the Western dusklands (from Coetzee’s uncredited jacket copy).
Dusklands, J. M. Coetzee’s first novel, was published by the small Johannesburg-based Ravan Press, known for its anti-apartheid output (UK and US editions were not issued until 1982). Weighing in at a mere 134 pages, its two parts, “The Vietnam Project” and “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee” (the latter “Edited, with an Afterword, by S.J. Coetzee; Translated by J.M. Coetzee”) are cast as first-person accounts, the first part that of Eugene Dawn, a specialist in psychological warfare in the service of the U.S. government during the war in Vietnam who dreams of “total air-war” while reading literary fiction in a motel. The second part is presented as a translation (complete with scholarly apparatus) of the testimony of Jacobus Coetzee, an eighteenth-century explorer – who may or may not be the author’s ancestor – recounting his travels into the interior of what is now the Western and Northern Cape provinces of South Africa, describing, with gruesome clarity, the massacre of the indigenous Khoisan people. (The Journal of Hendrik Jacob Wikar [1799] records a similar journey undertaken by the real Jacobus Coetzé in 1760).
Coetzee’s description of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (another two-part work that eludes interpretative closure) as “a mysterious work, inviting interpretation and resisting it at the same time”, and the experience of “having been in the company of [not one] personage or two personages, but of having listened to, or been inhabited by, a voice or voices”, might be applied to Dusklands and its vertiginous mingling and overlapping of historical times and voices (Coetzee, the name of the book’s author and, the second part’s eighteenth-century narrator, “translator” and “fictional” historian father, is also that of the “powerful, genial, ordinary man, so utterly without vision” to whom Dawn reports in “The Vietnam Project”). The novel’s play with the generic templates of fiction, history, biography and scholarship contribute to its cumulative effect as a statement about the persistence of political oppression, not least of the institutionalised racial segregation in South Africa at the time – and the grim symbiosis between abuses of power and psychological decline.
See J. C. Kannemeyer, translated by Michiel Heyns, J.M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing (Johannesburg & Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2012); Molloy, in J.M. Coetzee: Late Essays (London: Harvill Secker, 2017), pp. 192-201.
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