I. NADINE GORDIMER (b. 1923):
WOMEN WRITING THE MALE BLINDSPOT
"The Moment Before the Gun Went Off" (1991) [2575/2573]

--Remember Virginia Woolf (2139/2201)
--The Immorality Act
--Shifting Narrative Perspective [2575/2573]
  i. Marais Van der Vyver
  ii. the farming community
--Voyeurism (2576)
--Connection (2575)
--Blindspots

II. J. M. COETZEE (b.1940)
Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

--Blend of realism (e.g. Austen, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky)
and non-realism (Kafka, Beckett) vs. Gordimer's realism

Interesting issues:
1. Geographical location: not South Africa but imperial allegory
2. The politics of the magistrate:
Liberal humanist who finds:
non-intervention = irresponsible neglect, or tacit complicity?

3.Representations of torture, both secret and public:
--torture chamber as metaphor
--the novelist's dilemma
--the reader's position
torture chamber = "the hut by the granary"
torture as public spectacle

2840 & 2841: Withdrawal to cell = preserve my humanity,
refuse barbarism.
Intervention = ineffectual, self-destructive.

4. Humanity:
rational will, imagination, sympathy/respect for life
All work towards liberty, equality, justice for all.
AND
Humanity:
rational will to power
imagination for maximum submission (Why, for instance, the hammer?)
imagining the suffering of others = imagining the most effective cruelty.

2847: Humanity = "to live in a body" and no more.