Dusklands: "Pornography," "Lies," and the "Lures of Interiors".

This article returns to some of the ur-texts for Dusklands' "The Vietnam Project," considering neglected contexts and sources for Coetzee's first novel. My purpose is to begin to tell the story of how, as Coetzee's "American fiction" evolved from early, exploratory drafts, he sharpened the work's satiric quality (not least its "critique" of modern American culture) even as he developed unsettling connections between acts of reading and acts of (moral) trespass. Touching on Dusklands' connection to therapy and the fraught relation between storytelling and truth, I also wish to position Coetzee's first novel as a work that anticipates the author's abiding concerns with societal guilt and collective spectation, in part through an engagement with then-contemporary media theory. Finally, I highlight a largely unexplored novelistic influence on "The Vietnam Project," sketching the generic and characterological affinities between Eugene Dawn's monologue and that of Willem Termeer -- the narrator of Marcellus Emants's A Posthumous Confession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]