Modernism Has Often Caused Coetzee to do a double take. “I have never known how seriously to take Joyce’s — or Stephen Dedalus’s — ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’” (DP, 67). But the fact that Coetzee does look again at the ambivalence of modernism’s message, questioning how seriously one should regard its most emblematic and solemn pronouncements, suggests that he hasn’t been willing to think of modernism as finished. While he is adamant that “an unquestioning attitude toward forms or conventions is as little radical as any other kind of obedience” (DP, 64), Coetzee’s dynamic ways of responding to the modernist legacy exemplify how he has sought to realize the promises of his formally radical precursors — even, and especially, if those responses amount to deliberate acts of disobedience, deliberate avoidances of pastiche. For Coetzee has never been passive in the face of literary heritage. And in returning to his earliest novel, the purpose of this chapter is not simply to paint a portrait of Coetzee at a stage in his career when he was most influenced by modernism, but rather to explore how this text might be considered as a deliberate meditation on the political implications of reviving modernist aesthetics. Insofar as this novel — which, incidentally, some prefer to regard as two novellas, even though both narratives rely upon their thematic correspondence with each other — is aware of the modernist conventions it redeploys, I don’t mean to imply that Dusklands (1974) is simply a metafictional account of its own indebtedness to early twentieth-century literary history. If anything, it anticipates Coetzee’s eventual diffidence toward “self-referentiality,” that hallmark of postmodern narration whose attractions, for him, “soon pall,” because “writing-about-writing hasn’t much to offer” (DP, 204). Instead, what this early novel shows us is that Coetzee hadn’t given up on the possibilities of modernism even as he was breaking new ground. Coetzee’s utilization of the technical accomplishments of what could still have been perceived, at the time of this novel’s release, as a Eurocentric movement, drawing upon its resources to narrate interracial violence in colonial South Africa, is unquestionably controversial.1 It highlights the ethical ramifications of Coetzee’s choices in responding to and reemploying modernist methods to tell horrific stories of colonial dominance.