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Examples Of Torture And Into The Dark Chamber

Decent Essays

3.2 Torture and Into the Dark Chamber
Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians is often considered to be his most powerful work, because it offers a significant addition to the international discourse on torture in South Africa. For Coetzee, it represented a unique challenge to his literary craft, namely, how to present such an atrocity as torture in a novel without repeating it:

For the writer the deeper problem is not to allow himself to be impaled on the dilemma proposed by the state, namely, either to ignore its obscenities or else to produce representations of them. The true challenge is: how not to play the game by the rules of the state, how to establish one’s own authority, how to imagine torture and death on one’s own terms. (Coetzee ed. Atwell, Doubling the Point 364) …show more content…

The author stated that “the dark fascination of torture on [him] and many other South African writers”, seems to have two particular reasons (Coetzee ed. Attwell 363). The author summed up, “the first [reason] is that relations in the torture room provide a metaphor, bare and extreme, for relations between authoritarianism and its victims”, and reason two “that the torture room is a site of extreme human experience, accessible to no one save the participants” (Coetzee ed. Attwell 363. The element of torture creates a crisis of comprehension for the Magistrate, as well as for the reader, in Waiting for the Barbarians, however also of portrayal for

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