Picturing Violence

In 1973 Coetzee gave an early manuscript version of what would later become ‘The Vietnam Project’ to his friend Daniel Hutchinson. In a covering note he drew attention to the parallels between the two stories of Duskland s that were, on the face of it, worlds apart: ‘You will notice that these two stories are thematically and formally identical. I am puzzled by this phenomenon and would be most interested to have it explained to me.’ 1 ‘The Vietnam Project’ was set in contemporary America, and in the story’s centre is Eugene Dawn’s marital and mental breakdown against the background of his classified Vietnam War research; ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’ is a semi-fictionalised account of a late-eighteenth-century Cape frontiersman who embarks on an expedition to Namaqualand. In a subsequent interview with Joanna Scott, Coetzee thought that the two narratives shared ideas, ‘but otherwise the relation is loose’.