Looking Awry in Timothy Mo

Abstract In a conflict-ridden world, how might the contemporary novel witness violence? The present article pursues this question by turning to British Chinese author Timothy Mo's novel The Redundancy of Courage (1991), an allegorical account of Indonesia's capture of East Timor (1975–99). In its expression and form, Mo's novel inscribes witnessing as an art of looking awry—an imperfect yet imperative undertaking. The discussion weaves together the characterological functions of a Chinese attestant and the rhetorical affordance of a dialogic address, which work to cultivate a receptive republic of witnesses. In recalibrating attestation as corroborative and processual, Mo's work draws upon Chinese business culture but reworks its economic content into ethical substance. In Mo's hands, this article contends, the novel as testimonial form is not an unhitched object but rather a highly localized one, and in this case, it is a forum for ethnic Chinese reckoning. Despite repeated pronouncements about the death of the novel, Mo's prescient fiction shows that the genre is very much alive, not least in self-reflexively bearing witness to atrocities in an age of digital media.