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The Person of the Torturer: Secret Policemen in Fiction and Nonfiction

The Person of the Torturer: Secret Policemen in Fiction and Nonfiction <p>Abstract:</p><p> J. M. Coetzee described his novel <i>Waiting for the Barbarians</i> as a response to the South African government’s tacit employment of torture and assassination to silence opposition to apartheid. He claimed that the novelist seeking to represent the secret policeman in such a society was faced with a dilemma: he or she must either portray the torturer by means of cliché and fail aesthetically or attribute glamour or grandeur to the world of the torturer and fail morally. The existence of this problem appears to justify Coetzee’s presentation of the two torturers in his novel, Colonel Joll and Warrant Officer Mandel, as little more than faceless functionaries. I shall argue that the dilemma is false, drawing on journalist Jacques Pauw’s <i>In the Heart of the Whore</i>, an exposé of torture and assassination under apartheid that takes former secret policeman Dirk Coetzee as its protagonist. </p> http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Journal of Aesthetic Education University of Illinois Press

The Person of the Torturer: Secret Policemen in Fiction and Nonfiction

The Journal of Aesthetic Education , Volume 51 (4) – Nov 28, 2017

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Publisher
University of Illinois Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
ISSN
1543-7809

Abstract

<p>Abstract:</p><p> J. M. Coetzee described his novel <i>Waiting for the Barbarians</i> as a response to the South African government’s tacit employment of torture and assassination to silence opposition to apartheid. He claimed that the novelist seeking to represent the secret policeman in such a society was faced with a dilemma: he or she must either portray the torturer by means of cliché and fail aesthetically or attribute glamour or grandeur to the world of the torturer and fail morally. The existence of this problem appears to justify Coetzee’s presentation of the two torturers in his novel, Colonel Joll and Warrant Officer Mandel, as little more than faceless functionaries. I shall argue that the dilemma is false, drawing on journalist Jacques Pauw’s <i>In the Heart of the Whore</i>, an exposé of torture and assassination under apartheid that takes former secret policeman Dirk Coetzee as its protagonist. </p>

Journal

The Journal of Aesthetic EducationUniversity of Illinois Press

Published: Nov 28, 2017

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