VIETNAM REVISITED

HISTORY, HOLOCAUST, IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL DEBATE AND COETZEE’S DUSKLANDS

Abstract

The paper is a response to what has been recognized by the filmmaker Clay Claiborne, the author of the 2008 documentary Vietnam: The American Holocaust, as an urgent need to face the suppressed truth about the Vietnam War as the best vantage point from which to examine the mechanism of historical repetition. The continuity of war and violence, despite declarative promises of peace and stability, is the paradox that since the WWII has increasingly engaged the attention of historians, cultural critics and commentators, and artists. In the first part of the paper the views are represented of those among them who come from different fields yet, like Claiborne, use the benefit of the same, post-colonial, hindsight to reach the common conclusion about the holocaust, not as a unique aberration, but as historically recurrent and culturally conditioned phenomenon. The strategies used to justify and perpetuate it – the second major focus in this part of the paper – are not limited to deliberate falsification of historical facts though, for beyond what Harold Pinter called “the thick tapestry of lies” concealing the crimes of the past, there is the willingness, generated by western myths of racial supremacy, to believe the lies and/or condone the crimes. Within this (imperialist, patriarchal) mythic tradition, a particular kind of split identity is produced by, and reproduces in its turn, the kind of violent history we tend to take for granted: I argue, along with J. Habermas, L. Friedberg, C. Nord and H. Giroux, that the factual truth will stop short of the transformative effect, political or moral, we traditionally expect from it as long as the deep-seated affective alienation from whatever has been construed as the other that constitutes this identity remains unrecognized and unattended. Confronting such forms of radical inner dissociation, considered normal or desirable in patriarchal culture, have been, at least since Shakespeare, art’s ultimate raison d’étre. In the second part of the paper I provide what I consider one of the supreme examples of literary deconstructions of western identity forming traditions – Dusklands, Coetzee’s novel about the continuity of consciousness bringing together the geographically and historically distant events: the colonial massacres of the African Hottentots and the genocidal assault on Vietnam. Rather than offering a thorough examination of this richly layered novel, the aim of my analysis is to point to the ingenious strategies, particularly to the ironic intertextual allusions to Hegel’s master/slave paradigm, Coetzee employs to represent the ‘demanifestation/denazification’ of western historical sense as a process parallel to that of dismantling of patriarchal identity.