Dusklands

In Dusklands the subject of power and its possession/inheritance is given an intriguing treatment.  The book has a deft maneuvering of positions and motives that revolve around this caustic issue.  My focus is mainly on The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee though this erratic relationship plays out in the Vietnam Project as well.  But in the Narrative the relationship exist and transpires between two, more distinctly spelled out, people/cultures.  One the (seemingly) dominant and assertive and the other (seemingly) docile and conquered.  In this context the dynamic that comes to play out is not the one that is classically rendered nor suspected.  The journey that Jacobus undertakes is premised on his ability to travel wherever he deems appropriate, in fact the hubris he demonstrates in taking upon himself to name portions of the landscape and other geological features makes evident the degree of subjugation that exist and further more endorses this thinking while happening on a level that is seen/felt as natural.  Interestingly enough it is this exact conventional wisdom that allows the dramatic shift of power.  Coetzee weaves throughout the narrative Jacobus's explicit musings upon civilization(s) and within these surfaces an inherent taxonomy.  On pg. 80 he talks heroically about himself, "We cannot count the wild.  The wild is one because it is boundless.  We can count fig-trees, we can count sheep because the orchard and the farm are bounded.  The essence of orchard tree and farm sheep is number.  I have presided over the becoming number of ten thousand creatures...I am a hunter...a hero of enumeration."  This arrogance Jacobus posits as duty.  This non-consideration of the other is a demonstration of the colonizers brutality afforded by their position of power. There is another line from that same page that I find  interesting, "He who does not understand number does not understand death."  The sentiment has a very fixed quality, one which centers around death with a very western perspective.  With this rational Jacobus travels deeper into the interior, falls sick and here the dependency switches and as do the roles, aside from one (Klawer), whose eventual erosion climaxes in a brutal beating and mutiny.  As power is shifted into another sphere we see the newly empowered demonstrate their own form of ferocity.  The treatment that is wielded both on the natives and Jacobus is what made this book so complex.  Where one behavior is expected, that of Jacobus, the exhibition of the other, that being the natives conduct, reduces the notions we commonly hold of indigenous/colonized cultures. An idea that forwards purity, innocence, benevolence and equitability upon certain (pre-colonial) cultures that is not aways accurate.  It relates to the discussion we had in class in regards to Shohat/Trinh and the problems associated in post-colonial studies, namely the romanticizing of historical representation.  Coetzee brings a stronger, more rounded and I feel more qualified detailing, in a historiographical sense, of these elements.  In the afterword on pg. 113 Coetzee writes, "Stolen animals would be barbarously treated.  With the Eskimo the Bushmen shared the repugnant belief that animals have ben placed on this earth ...to gratify his most perverse appetites...The haunch of a stolen ox would be hacked off and eaten before the beast's agonized eyes."  We see the sadistic natures of all the involved parties.  These tendencies than act to resist the possibility that there exist an exactly peaceable and just civilization, that concept becomes a notion which will never be fully realized because human nature regardless of where we emanate has instinctual workings that override our products of reason.  The question it seems, or what I have gathered from this reading and is one of the many that I feel Coetzee is posing in each of these novellas, is that the person/culture, wherever and whoever, that holds the power will exhibit and carry out actions influenced by that benefit where as the other/powerless will naturally demonstrate behavior consistent with their milieu.  That there exist no race or culture which stand as pre-ordained in terms of power but rather the factors of environment and opportunity decides who stands where.