In J. M. Coetzee's two anti-colonial novels, Waiting for the Barbarians and Foe, the white colonizer narrators are fascinated with the inexplicable signs of torture on the subaltern bodies. Scholars have critiqued that, despite Coetzee's narrative experimentation, the subaltern characters are still objectified under the colonizer's gaze and remain silenced. Drawing on fascination studies, this essay argues that Coetzee's novels aim to reflect and ultimately deconstruct the narrative of fascination operated in colonial storytelling. Symbolized by the medusa's image, fascination indicates an unsettling engagement with something that elicits simultaneous attraction and repulsion in the beholder's mind. This essay first examines how Coetzee's novels reveal the fictionality of "the fascination with the primitive," a pervasive element in colonial discourse used to construct otherness. Second, it explores how Coetzee's narrators reach the aporia of the narrative of fascination, where the seductive power of storytelling collapses when confronted with the unknowable other's silence. By framing the narrative of fascination within metanarrative terms, Coetzee challenges the narrative authority and sovereign subjectivity traditionally upheld in Western literature, while also prompting readers to reflect on their own roles as interpreters and consumers of such stories, particularly those involving the suffering of others.
