ABSTRACT
Bearing in mind the commonly acknowledged enduring effects of trauma on any society that has suffered from systematic, institutionalised oppression and inhumane treatment under a totalitarian regime, South African society, its history, and culture might be approached through the optics of trauma studies. Accordingly, this study is grounded in Dominic LaCapra’s observation that empathy is fundamental in responding to trauma, providing it is disentangled from its traditional reading as a total fusion of the self and the other. Its purpose is to investigate the discursive inscription of “empathic unsettlement” in two post-apartheid narratives: The Whale Caller by Zakes Mda and Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. On this basis, it is argued that Zakes Mda’s novel may be seen as discursively inscribing empathic unsettlement, thus problematising the metaphysics of human and non-human relationships. In the case of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, it is shown how, while clearly postulating the need for empathy towards one’s ethnic, gender, or generic others, the narrative perceptively lays bare the limits of one’s “sympathetic imagination.”
