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Coetzee employs his sympathetic imagination (as expressed by Elizabeth Costello) already in his early novels and tests its limits. As readers we closely follow the footsteps of Jacobus Coetzee, Eugene Dawn, Magda, the Magistrate, and Michael K, co-inhabiting their

46 _{„In his diaries he developed for himself the artistic persona of ‘Monsieur le vivisecteur’, one who explored} states of consciousness and emotional relations with an intellectual scalpel.” (Coetzee 2007) Mehigan in the context of his discussion of Slow Man comments: “Coetzee’s project might be likened to that of the vivisector, of the surgeon who, with scalpel in hand, probes ever more deeply through layers of tissue in search of the affliction that has brought about the subject’s suffering […]” (Mehigan 2011: 195)

47 _{Stefan Helgesson in the conclusion of his 2004 study Writing in Crisis. Ethics and History in Gordimer,} Ndebele and Coetzee notes:

It is also in my discussion of that [LTMK] book that the ethical significance of blankness is properly foregrounded as a mode of resistance – historically marked as post-colonial – to the appropriations of the imperial subject. Representation of difference is in this regard not viable, as the structures of representation elide difference once it is represented. Each narrative tends therefore to be most loyal to the notion of heterogeneity and difference in their moments of blankness. […] As aesthetic artefacts, the all participate in the successive dismantling of the authority of the Western subject by resituating, symbolically, the foundations of subjectivity as well as literary form. (Helgesson 2004: 239f)

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physical spaces, their minds, and their hearts. With them we experience the “empathic unsettlement” of the protagonists, who all show symptoms of trauma in some form or other.48 In the “Vietnam Project” (Dusklands, first section) we are confronted with the complicity of Eugene Dawn in the war efforts aimed at the subjugation of the Vietnam people, and witness the effects it has on him. Jacobus Coetzee, on the other hand, is explorer and conqueror, a perpetrator of colonial and imperialist violence. Kannemeyer acutely comments:

In ‘The Narrative’ Coetzee would for the first and last time employ a speaker inflicting pain with violence and from a lust to power. In the novels to follow, as David Atwell points out, such characters would be the antagonists of the narrator. As against Jacobus Coetzee, the narrating Magda in In the Heart of the Country is the victim of pain, with her overbearing patriarchal father as the antagonist. (Kannemeyer 2012: 275)

In a similar vein, Peter McDonald characterizes Jacobus Coetzee and Eugene Dawn as one of the “pathological rationalists who attempt, without success, to redeem their solipsistic selves through horrifyingly savage acts of violence.” (McDonald 2009: 307)

In the Heart of the Country and Life &Times of Michael K the inner life of victims is

portrayed, once exemplified by the white female position of Magda (who is implicated in the colonial settler’s scheme of domination but suffers from it and attempts to resist it), then by the – presumably ‘coloured’ – Michael K. After Dusklands, Coetzee’s first novel, we witness a shift from perpetrator to victim. Both Magda and the Magistrate constitute a transitive middle ground between the position of a victim and a perpetrator; they are implicated in the hierarchical structures of settler-colonialism and patriarchy, but struggle to defy their position and the systematic violence and oppression involved. In a way they enunciate the position of the white liberal humanist faced with the decision of looking away (and enjoying the benefits) or taking action against the atrocities dealt out to the marginalized and oppressed.

Coetzee allows readers a close encounter with all his characters, and our sympathies are tested in each case – none of the characters are heroic and admirable, and thus an easy positive identification is prevented. While suffering from his mental isolation Eugene Dawn experiences a breakdown in which he stabs his own son with a pencil. Jacobus Coetzee gets lost in his raging retribution. With these two characters the reader will find it hard to sympathize, but Coetzee’s text makes it nearly impossible not to engage with them and be empathetic towards them, even though they become instruments of violence and fail to connect with any respective other:

48 _{Dominic LaCapra in his excellent 2001 study Writing History, Writing Trauma writes: “Being responsive to} the traumatic experience of others, notably of victims, implies not the appropriation of their experience but what I would call empathic unsettlement, which should have stylistic effects or, more broadly, effects in writing which cannot be reduced to formulas or rules of method.” (LaCapra 2001: 41; emphasis added)

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Jacobus Coetzee fails because, paradoxically, his all-consuming advance into Africa eliminates everything outside of himself, destroying the limits which would allow the self to distinguish self from Other; Eugene Dawn fails as he is inevitably recaptured by the institutions embodying societal control. (Dovey 1998: 20)

Magda at least attempts to overcome her isolation, but in the end is bound to fail. The Magistrate presents a more ambivalent case. Here, the reader’s judgment is suspended, waiting for the events to unfold. The obsession with the barbarian girl’s wounds of torture allows for a reflection on his implication in the physical torture of prisoners of an authoritarian system, as well as an opening up of his empathetic faculties. The Magistrate experiences a desire to close the gap between him and the barbarian girl, but in the end the reader is left to judge the accomplishment.

In the private thoughts of the protagonists the reader can witness the perceptual boundaries engraved in their minds causing the failure of the sympathetic imagination. The complex portrayal of the characters does not avoid contradictions inherent in their narrated self-portrayal: 1) Dawn’s cold rhetoric stands in contrast to his violent breakdown 2) Jacobus Coetzee’s isolation contradicts his imagined superiority; as does his unreliable narration 3) Magda’s unreliable narration and her meandering thoughtscape 4) Michael K’s mental eloquence in contrast to his silences. Especially in the case of Magda, Coetzee presents such a variety of facets to the reader, that I find it tempting to label it cubist literature; alluding to Pablo Picasso’s cubist technique in his portraits of Gertrude Stein, Dora Maar, Henry Kahnweiler, and others, where various perspectives are collapsed into one picture, resulting in a multi-fractured image.49 Picasso had aimed at deconstructing the genre of the portrait to accommodate modern tendencies of art, more specifically the paradigms of cubism. Picasso’s portraits no longer ennoble the portrayed person, but instead show him/her in their vast complexity by including a multitude of perspectives in one portrait, resembling the fractured identities present in all of us. Coetzee’s style of characterization, particularly in the early novels, employs an analogous procedure in writing. There is no central authority that can give us readers the truth about the characters, their self-narration provides a multitude of facets instead, which create a fractured portrait of the protagonist. The autobiographical fiction

Summertime employs a cubist approach again in the process of subverting and deconstructing

the genre of autobiography.