JM Coetzee’s "The Vietnam project"

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vietnamproject

It may be argued that Eugene Dawn’s final ambition in JM Coetzee’s “The Vietnam Project”[1] is “finding whose fault I am”[2] in order that “he may at last know what sins of the fathers he is guilty of”.[3] It is equally plausible, really, that Dawn’s discovering “whose fault” he is serves his conscience in finding a culprit other than himself for his sins.

Dawn is as a self-proclaimed “creative”, working in the Vietnam Project’s Mythography Section[4] under the management of a fictional Coetzee. He is fully engrossed in the task of demoralising the Vietnamese “enemy” in Stage IV of the war in Indo-China (1973). Coetzee’s vision for Dawn’s job description is analogous to Socrates’ Noble Lie – the terminology of the mother earth and the children, and their relationship, are the same. Whereas Socrates’ Phoenician tale is meant to ensure the loyalty of the citizens to the state, Dawn’s mission is to reformulate the Noble Lie to suit the new imperial master (America) in Indo-China.[5]

One of Dawn’s proposals is to “subvert and revise the myth” of the vulnerable “father” and formidable and protective “mother” in Vietnamese culture, and to construct a “countermyth” to suit American interests.[6] To secure “obedience” he proposes an alternative to eliminating the physical enemy: a direct attack on their safe haven – the womb from which they were delivered, where they have thence been protected. With the aim of destroying the mother and assuming the role of the father he asks, “Is it not time that the earth-mother is supplanted by her own faithful daughter, shaped without woman’s part?”[7] Destroying the mother entails its obliteration through poisoning it with PROP-12. “Our future belongs not to the earth but to the stars. Let us show the enemy that he stands naked in a dying landscape.”[8] Dawn plays out this strategy in his mind’s eye’s enemy lands and in his own home; in neither does it succeed. Dawn regards the primary characters of his life on the same trajectory as their counterparts in the original myth in need of being overthrown in Indo-China, ie he begins to see the mythological “mother” and “son” in the same light as Marilyn and Martin. As the power arrangements in the original Vietnamese myth need to be rearranged to meet Americans needs, so, too, do the power arrangements in Dawn’s life need to be reformulated to suit his interests.

As Dawn’s seeks “obedience” in Vietnam he wants the same in his home. That the earth-of-Vietnam of his life is Marilyn is made clear when Coetzee makes him condemn both her and the mythological “mother” with “treachery”. Dawn later speaks in his institutionalized state: “I have a treacherous wife, an unhappy home.”[9] In the same way that the psychological conquest of the Vietnamese rebels is attempted through “countermyths”, Dawn tries to reclaim power at home through reconstructing the symbolism of perceived events. The consequence of having “deepened … [himself] … further and further”[10] in the Vietnam Project on his having become inadequate in satisfying his wife’s sexual (and emotional) needs is reinterpreted. He describes their sexual encounters:

Before the arrival of my seed her pouch yawns and falls back, leaving my betrayed representative gripped at its base, flailing its head in vain inside an immense cavern, at the very moment when above all else it craves to be rocked through its tantrum in a soft, firm, infinitely trustworthy grip.[11]

Ineffectiveness (or, impotence) is the fundamental theme of JM Coetzee’s story. The reader is not made aware of how physically and emotionally engaged Marilyn and Dawn were before his involvement with the Vietnam Project; one presumes it was to a degree superior to the present condition in which Marilyn is “disengaged”.[12] The hint is her weeping at nights: “I urge her to cheer up … I am my old self, I tell her, my same old loving self.”[13] It is assumed that in the days she longs for, she was satisfied with the “gristle that hangs from … [his] … end”[14] rather than just letting his seed drip “like urine into the futile sewer of … [her] … reproductive ducts”.[15] Dawn has two solutions for the current predicament; neither helps the quiet Marilyn, who simply endures.

vietnamproject_other

Dawn’s solutions to his sexual problems have parallels in his “research” propositions for Vietnam – both are crafts of persuasion. In the first instance Dawn incorporates a machine to supplant his “gristle”. He relies on a mechanical extension to create physiological arousal in his wife’s body and thereby regains the “power” to make her genitals react. He convinces himself that “she loves it” when, in fact, she “cries when I do it”.[16] The other manner in which Dawn employs self-persuasion is by way of faithful adherence to the baseless conviction that there is a problem exterior to himself through which he is able to assign Marilyn “treachery”: extra-marital affairs.

Dawn is convinced (or pretends to be) that Marilyn is unfaithful on Wednesdays when she “goes to San Diego for therapy and shopping”.[17] He says he is okay with it, “for if strangers prize her, she must be valuable, and I am reassured”.[18] He also persuades himself she is incapable of attaining satisfaction from them, since “she is by character a masturbator who needs steady mechanical friction …”[19] Her body, after all, no longer responds to him without a “battery driven probe” – he can accept other men desire and conquer, but not that she is aroused by them or might prefer them. In the end, Dawn’s “countermyth” of Marilyn’s affairs is productive only for his own conscience, not his marriage. One knows she is not unfaithful. He finds no evidence of infidelity; only, in her “writing case”, where there used to be a picture of him, there is now a naked picture of herself. This is all Dawn needs to anchor the “persuasion” for the “countermyth” of Marilyn’s “treachery” and thereby escape admitting his part in her psychological ruin. She submits to him until, as in the “original myth” in Vietnam, he threatens her child.

Dawn does not take ownership of his fatherhood until he assumes power over Martin via denying it to Marilyn, much in the same way that he advises Americans to usurp the father role in Vietnam. Dawn does not acknowledge Martin as his until he kidnaps him; he merely refers to him as part of an equation: “Marilyn and her child”,[20] “Marilyn and the child”.[21] Only with the decision to escape does Martin becomes his son. He speaks to himself: “You will pack a bag. You will take your son’s hand and walk out of the house.”[22] At this point Dawn takes possession; when the police are at his room’s door at the Hotel Loco demanding if he has with him “a child”, he responds, “Yes, it’s my child.”[23] By the end, however, the mother reclaims her son, but not before he proves to be a burden to the father who forces his authority upon him to the point that he yells and screams at him, trying to convince him that his enslavement is “all for the best”.[24] In the same breath Dawn yearns for his “deliverance!”.[25] He demands it from the War which, “since February of 1965 … has been living its life at my expense”.[26] The Vietnam Project ruins Dawn’s relationship with Marilyn – he begins to see his wife, and his child who is her extension, as the enemy. In Dawn’s life, as in the Vietnam Project, it becomes difficult to ascertain who is friend and foe, and which is oneself. Thus in 1973 Dawn, the father who usurps power, is no more able to manage his position than the Americans (to whom he advises the same action) in Vietnam.

Coetzee illustrates through microcosm (the destruction of one man) the inefficacy and cost of the Vietnam War. Marilyn sees its mirror in this “man’s soul” transform into something with its “human sympathies coarsened”; she accuses him of having “become addicted to violent and perverse fantasies”.[27] It is true. One sees it clearly when Dawn uses the same vocabulary for his personal life as he does for his Vietnam Proposals, eg the radio is an instrument for “rival voices”,[28] both in his home, “that Marilyn releases from the radio between 7:00 and 8:00”,[29] and in Vietnam. For Dawn, the terminology remains the same; only the context shifts, from his home to Vietnam. He loses himself, he loses his marriage, and so, too, do the Americans lose Vietnam. Dawn has the advantage that his mythology is his own: “Nor, if I were to commit myself body and soul to some fiction or other, would I choose any fiction but my own. I am still the captain of my soul,”[30] he says. All in the end is lost to and subsumed in myth, with only the “creative” convinced (or pretending to be) of his own “fiction”: without commitment to the myth, the loss would not have been justified. Thus, “The reality – the reality, I tell you – fades. The inner truth is hidden – luckily, luckily.”[31]

Bibliography

Coetzee, JM. Dusklands, New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

Conrad, Joseph. DCRA Goonetilleke (ed). Heart of Darkness. 2nd Edition. Ontario:

Broadview Literary Texts, 1999.

Kannemeyer, John C. J.M. Coetzee A life in writing. Heyns, Michiel (trans). Scribe:

London, 2013.

Plato, Five Great Dialogues (Republic, Book III), [New York: Classics Club, by

Walter J. Black, 1942]. B. Jowett (trans); LR Loomis (ed).

 

[1] The initial story in Dusklands.

[2] Dusklands, 49.

[3] JM Coetzee: A life in writing, 33.

[4] Dusklands, 4.

[5] Republic, Book III, 302.

[6] Dusklands, 25.

[7] Dusklands, 26.

[8] Dusklands, 29.

[9] Dusklands, 29.

[10] Dusklands, 8.

[11] Dusklands, 8.

[12] Dusklands, 8.

[13] Dusklands, 9.

[14] Dusklands, 7.

[15] Dusklands, 8.

[16] Dusklands, 10.

[17] Dusklands, 11.

[18] Dusklands, 11.

[19] Dusklands, 12.

[20] Dusklands, 8.

[21] Dusklands, 13.

[22] Dusklands, 36.

[23] Dusklands, 40.

[24] Dusklands, 38.

[25] Dusklands, 39.

[26] Dusklands, 38.

[27] Dusklands, 9.

[28] Dusklands, 14.

[29] Dusklands, 14.

[30] Dusklands, 10. Also: the famous couplet of the Victorian lyric poem “Invictus” by WE Henley.

[31] Heart of Darkness, 105.

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  • education advice

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