Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Coetzee’s Early Fiction: Representation, Grievability, Framing

Viet ThanhNguyen’s The Sympathizer(2015) is an intriguing novel for anyone familiar with the early fiction of J.M. Coetzee. Nguyen’s debut novel has as its theme the war in Vietnam, which is not surprising given his background and his scholarly work preceding its publication. Interestingly, Coetzee’s first novel, Dusklands(1974) comprised two novellas, the first of which,called “The Vietnam Project”, is also related to the US invasion of Vietnam. Both works offer critical insights into US war-mongering in the post-World War II era. Additionally, Coetzee’s third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians(1980), bears thematic resemblances with both his and Nguyen’s debut novels, as they, in one way or another, are concerned with imperialism’s modus operandi and its continuation through the subjugation, intimidation,and annihilation of collective subjects. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the parallels and overlaps that can be detected among these three novelsthat are germane to the stratagems adopted by an imperialist power to sustain its dominion, legitimize its presence,andjustify brutality. These stratagems mediate the way the imperial force relatesto or conceivesof the other. Of the concepts employed in this article,the following areof particular significance: representation, grievability, and framing.

Coetzee's Writing Style in his Waiting for the Barbarians

The purpose of this article is to scrutinize Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians to discover whether, while writing the novel, the author uses the Rhetoric Triangle. That is, he uses ethos, pathos and logos. Ethos deals with credibility, the trust the audience has in a speaker or writer. Pathos has to do with any text or scene that arouses emotions on the side of its audience or readers, and logos has to do with reasoning when it comes to depicting or writing work. After the investigation, which has been carried out through the New Criticism approach, it has been found out that Coetzee uses the Rhetoric Triangle in the novel. However, all the three components of the rhetoric triangle are not ubiquitous in the novel. Unlike logos and pathos, which are used several times throughout the novel, ethos is scarcely used.

Contesting Discourses and Transmodalization in J.M.Coetzee’s Fiction

South African metafictive literature by white writers, specifically J. M. Coetzee (Nobel laureate, 2003), is essentially pivoted on the black-white dialectics of discourse. The narrative is informed with a variety of sociopolitical inflections that pronounce in various ways the contemporary ideology in South African literature. Critics have greatly delineated the racio-political quagmire of the colonial subject in metafictive literature appearing in the last few decades of twentieth century. However, a deeper analysis of the representation of the colonial subject that interrogates the discourses in narrative is still untapped. J.M.Coetzee’s South African-based novels, mainly Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Age of Iron (1990), manifest a metafictional consciousness that investigates the constructs of reality of the colonial subject. It is significant to explore the logocentric premise in the representation of colonial subject and how this contributes to the meaning of the fictional word. This study is a narratological research of Coetzee’s technique of transmodalization (narrative mode shifts) between two types of discourses, the pedagogical and performative, and employs Homi K Bhabha’s (1994) theoretical framework of representative discourse. In examining the narrative mode shifts between frame breaks, metanarrative, narrative of words, narrative of dreams, and narrative of topography, this research argues that a non-position is generated between the contesting discourses. This research becomes a model for the study of colonial dynamics in metafictive white writing. It aims to unravel the elements integral in voicing the conditionality of the colonized subject and the contention of representation. This study also explores the metonymical relationships in narrative that reflect intrinsic aspects of the signification of representation.

“I see what I have been dreading”:Witnessing Food and Violence in Waiting for the Barbarians and In the Heart of the Country

This paper explores the presence of a food and consumption related gaze in J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and In the Heart of the Country (1977). Through the phenomenon of food witnessing, I argue that the food-related gaze is tied with the narrative frame through which torture and violence is witnessed and recorded. The act of watching people eat or other metaphors of food (largely examined throught the idea of 'food witnessing') serve as a way to identify, observe and obliterate the Other.

Waiting for the Barbarians

The final chapter moves to the future-oriented narratives of American science fiction, broadly conceived as a mode of representation committed to the imagination of alternative lifeworlds. The chapter opens with the Roman fragments of Michael Crichton’s Westworld and the remains of New York City in late nineteenth-century dystopian fiction in order to outline the paradoxical relationship between historical representation and the imagination of an imperial (or decolonized) future. The chapter then moves to its three key writers, Isaac Asimov, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Samuel R. Delany. While each of them offer quite differently fantastical visions of antiquity’s place in the logics and aesthetics of the future, they all find connections through their employment of the ancient figure of the “barbarian” and its role in imperial philosophies and politics.