WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS- J. M. Coetzee

ALLEGORICAL NOVEL: Waiting…is about morality and violence and

about exploring human cruelty. It challenges humanity in several ways.

It focuses on the impact of fear in human psyche and imperialism’s self destructive power.

How far fear and anxiety can go and how far members of society can follow a blind power is the main concern of the novel.

In Coetzee’s words Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel about “the impact of the torture chamber on the life of a man of conscience”

The man of conscience is the main protagonist, the Magistrate.

He lives in a border town isolated from the other world.

He has responsibility and authority of maintaining the outpost for the service of the Empire but he loses his power when the Empire sent an army to protect the town from the barbarians.

The protagonist protests the unjust treatment of the so called “barbarians” although the Empire perceives them as a dangerous tribe preparing to attack the outpost and battle against the Empire.

When he returns a captured barbarian woman he sympathizes and cares to her people, he is accused for treason and imprisoned like the barbarians. He becomes the subject of cruelty, humiliation and torture.

Creation of the barbarian girl as the representation of the other to problematize the attitude which perceives difference as having no subjectivity.

The existence of the barbarian girl criticizes the perspective which pushes minorities to the margins and never allows any chance to the “other” to survive in itself. 

Identity of ‘Barbarian’ will always be regarded as ‘other’ by Imperialist system.

Her otherness is carried to her body by the novelist.

Her deformed tortured body actually visualizes the deformed ideology of imperialism which perceives her other  because of her “barbarian” identity.

Barbarian girl is a prisoner of Colonel Joll but after their release she is left behind by her folk in the outpost, begging, semi-blinded and disfigured from the torture. This symbolizes in extremes that how people can be transformed to be perceived as the other by an ideology and how the normal can turned out to be abnormal by the system.

Relationship between the Magistrate and the barbarian girl

“I cast my mind back, trying to recover an image of her as she was before. I must believe that I saw her on the day she was brought in by soldiers roped neck to neck with the other barbarian prisoners. I know that my gaze has passed over her when together with others (…). My eye passed over her; but I have no memory of that passage. On that day she was still unmarked; but I must believe she was unmarked as I must believe she was once a child (…). Strain as I will, my first image remains of the kneeling beggar-girl. (Coetzee, 1982: 33).”

Magistrate’s dream of children playing. Snow and a faceless child. He doesn’t know about her origin, identity, and culture.

As a member of the Empire Magistrate feels guilty for the girl.

Wenzel reads the relationship between the Magistrate and the girl by saying that “ the Magistrate seeks to eliminate his sense of the girl’s otherness and to understand the pain of her torture as he verbally and physically probes the girl in an effort to read the signs of torture written on her body” 

she will always stay as the other, both as a barbarian in the eye of the Empire and as carrying the marks of the Empire in her uncanny body, in the eyes of her folk.

The Magistrate: However kindly she may be treated by her own people, she will never be courted and married in the normal way: she is marked for life as the property of a stranger, and no one will approach her save in the spirit of lugubrious sensual pity that she detected and rejected in me. (Coetzee,1982: 135).

According to Coetzee, torture room is a metaphor “for relations between authoritarianism and its victims.

He understands that torture leaves marks which can not be effaced 

He questions: How do you find it possible to eat afterwards, after you have been working with people? (...) I have imagined that one would want to wash one’s hands. But no ordinary washing would be enough, one would require priestly intervention, a ceremonial of cleansing, don’t you think? Some kind of  purging of one’s soul too – that is how I imagined it. Otherwise how would it be possible to return to everyday life- to sit down a table, for instance, and break bread with one’s family or one’s comrades? (Coetzee, 1982: 126)

Washing the traces away from the girl’s body which the torturer has left is impossible, but it is impossible too, to wash away the responsibility from the torturer’s hand.

The Magistrate also turns out to be other like the barbarian girl.

He locates himself against Colonel Joll and questions the authority of the Empire. He separates himself from the Empire.

He is regarded as a traitor and he is regarded as guilty as the barbarians without any doubts since the other is always the guilty one.

The system pushes every  identity, individual and idea different than its subjectivity, to its margins and punishes every resistance to its self. Even if the resistance is against violence.

His mind is like the history of the town and his journey is the mental self journey.

The third victim is the woman. Once being the part of the law of father as a

Magistrate which has an authority in terms of Lacan rationalization of subjectivity, Colonel Joll by equating him with women, throw him away from the symbolic order.

Colonel Joll equates him with a woman by hanging him in a tree with woman clothes and showing him struggling in front of his town. I think this clearly criticizes the passive and silenced position of woman which does not have any access to gain authority in the society.

“Here,” says Mandel, and hands me a woman’s calico smock. “Put it on.”

“Why?”“Very well, if you want to go naked, go naked.”I slip the smock over my head. It reached

halfway down my thighs.(…)“The time has come, Magistrate,” Mandel

whispered in my ear. “Do your best to behave like a man” (Coetzee 1982: 117).

He is made an object of gaze the way women are always positioned.

Feminist film critics say that in society “woman is deprived of a gaze, deprived of subjectivity and repeatedly transformed into the object of a masculine scopophiliac desire” (Doane, 1987: 2).

By equating the Magistrate with the women and by hanging him half naked in front of the crowd, Magistrate is represented as the object of Colonel Joll’s scopophiliac pleasure which symbolically empowers Colonel’s masculinity and therefore both his subjectivity and authority.

How Magistrate is silenced by Colonel Joll who represents the empire, the authority and the realm of man, is narrated in the following way in the novel;“I try to call out something, a word of blind fear, a shriek, but the rope is now so tight that I am strangled, speechless.(…)I am swinging loose. The breeze lifts my smock and plays with my naked body. I am relaxed, floating. In a woman’s clothes. “(Coetzee,1982:120)

The 4th victim is the ‘self’. According to Freud all those feelings that arises trouble, anxiety, fear horror like as it is felt while reading Waiting for the Barbarians, belongs to the realm of uncanny. 

The existence of Barbarians is concealed and kept out of sight.

Who or what is the real danger? Danger does not come from the Barbarians.

The Empire leaves the place marked with fear and violence.

Head analyses the connotations of “waiting” and says;

“Joll needs the barbarians to arrive for his mission, and Empire’s function, to be validated. For the Magistrate, however, the barbarians have already arrived in the form of Empire’s militia: he has been waiting for Empire’s barbarity to manifest itself, so that he can begin the process of disentangling himself from its ideology of power and justice”

The Empire is self-destructive.

Magistrate: I have a lesson for him that I have long meditated. I mouth the words and watch him read them on my lips: “The crime that is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves,” I say. I nod and nod, driving the message at home.“Not on others, “I say: I repeat the words, pointing my chest, pointing at his.(Coetzee, 1982: 146).

TEXT: The title “Waiting for the Barbarians” is taken from a line

from the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy Story of an imaginary Empire Set in an unspecified place and time Barbarian tribes lives at the edge of the Empire. They visit the town with some purpose, only. Ex. Trade or

medicine. The magistrate is the central character in the novel. He

is the observer and the speaker. Colonel Joll is a heartless bureaucrat sent by the

Empire's secret service, ''the Third Bureau.'‘ The Third Bureau claims that the barbarians are

preparing to mutiny; the Colonel leads an expedition in search of rebels and returns with a group of nomads in chains, terrified and mute.

Although the Magistrate argues that the barbarians are harmless, the prisoners are tortured in accord with that ''modern psychology,'' which is the mark of all the secret police in our time.

Unable to control the emissaries of the Third Bureau, the Magistrate wants to dissociate himself from their methods even as, in honesty, he has to admit that he and they are both servants of the Empire.

The Magistrate becomes the critic of imperialism and defender of Barbarians.

The barbarian captives are broken by torture and then released.

One of them, however, an impassive girl with straight black eyebrows and glossy black hair, remains behind and is taken in by the Magistrate.

He wants to shield and nurse her, but also perhaps to dominate her.

The girl yields silently, but the Magistrate, his mind disarranged by the brutality of the Third Bureau, does not simply take her.

He uses her by tending her wounds, washing her broken feet and legs, rubbing her body with almond oil. It is, seemingly, an improvised ritual of domineering guilt, the confused gesture of a confused man.

The Magistrate decides to take her back to her tribe. 

The Magistrate is charged by the Third Bureau with treason, ''consorting with the enemy.'' He is imprisoned in the same barracks room where the barbarians were interrogated.

TO search and destroy the barbarian enemy, the Third Bureau sends troops into the land beyond the frontiers of the Empire. At first, reports of victory; then, a nervous silence; finally, the troops return, dazed and bedraggled. ''We were not beaten,'' says a survivor, ''(the barbarians) led us out into the desert and then they vanished! ... They lured us on and on, we could never catch them. They picked off the stragglers, they cut our horses loose in the night, they would not stand up to us!''

Colonel Joll and his men retreat; the Magistrate resumes his old authority. The Empire fades; the barbarians remain. Or is it only the specter of the barbarians? The town waits, apprehensive and helpless, expecting attack. Only now, in this bitter ending, do we grasp the full force of Mr. Coetzee's title, adapted from some lines by the Greek poet Cavafy: What does this sudden uneasiess mean, and this confusion? ...Because it is night and the barbarians have not come, and some men have arrived from the frontiers and they say that there are no barbarians any longer and now, what will become of us without barbarians? These people were a kind of solution.

CHARACTERS: The Magistrate— a person of authority who

administrates the imperial outpost and the singular consciousness through which the story is told. An aging man, he is overweight and growing soft.  

Colonel Joll—an officer of the Third Bureau, acting under emergency powers on the frontier. Cultured, reserved, he is described by the Magistrate as having “tapering fingernails, mauve handkerchiefs and slender feet in soft shoes.”

Warrant Officer Mandel—the Magistrates own personal “doctor of pain”. Installs himself in the Magistrate’s former office behind the court.

Old man—a barbarian man captured with his grandson following a raid on the fort, is tortured and eventually murdered by the Third Bureau.

Boy—the grandson of the barbarian man, traveling with him to see the doctor. Gravely ill and wounded by Colonel Joll and his men, he confesses under torture that his tribe is rallying for war and is brought on an expedition to rout out the barbarians.

Barbarian girl—blinded and crippled by the Third Bureau, she is left behind by her people and taken in by the Magistrate.

The fishing people—rounded up by the Third Bureau, these aboriginal people become closely tied to the town’s final destiny after the brush along the river is set on fire by the Third bureau.

A prostitute— she lives and works in the inn, visited by the Magistrate.

Two conscripts and a guide— they travel with the Magistrate to return the girl to her people, they give testimony against him to the Third Bureau.

Mai—has a relationship with the Magistrate after he is restored to authority.

Mai’s young son—delivers the food to the Magistrate in captivity. He lives on hope of the moment the boy will come and he can touch him on the shoulder.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS:

Aboriginal—the original or earliest known people of a region; natives.

Allegory—An abstract idea presented, usually in narrative form, with at least two levels of meaning.

Apartheid—a racist theory codified into law, giving one group privilege and power and strictly segregating the population.

Barbarian—a savage, primitive person living outside the formal laws and customs of civilization. Originally referred to peoples living outside the Roman Empire, the word was literally meant to simulate the non-Greek language of the outsider, which sounded like gabble to the Greek ear. In the novel, they are called nomadic and live in nearby mountains and desert.

The Civil Guard – the novel’s name for a military unit that runs the unnamed Empire.  In contemporary Europe and the Middle East, many countries operate combined military/police forces with similar names, such as the Guardia Civil in Spain.

The Empire – although no time period is given for the novel, the unnamed Empire closely resembles European colonial powers of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Fisher folk – this indigenous population, also called “river people”, are more ancient than the nomadic barbarians of the title. They are described as having “vast appetites, animal shamelessness, and volatile tempers,” – terms that are commonly associated with racist descriptions of aboriginal peoples.

Imperialism—the extension of the authority of an Empire over foreign parts, often enforced by military action and economic coercion.

Motif—a recurring image, symbol, theme or idea. The Other—In psychoanalytic criticism, “the other” is

that which defines and limits the self. Also used in literary criticism to denote any person or group of people set apart from the dominant social group. Both uses are in subtle play in Coetzee’s novel.

Polysemous – the potential for a word, phrase, or sign to have multiple and often contradictory meanings

River people – see Fisher folk above. The Third Bureau – within the novel, this shadowy

governmental organization oversees outposts of the unnamed Empire. The Magistrates says the Third Bureau has become the most important division of the Civil Guard, according to out-of-date gossip that reaches them from the capital.

Novel in a nutshell: The narrator calls himself an old man and spends almost

all of his leisure time thinking of sex with girls. At one point, he declares he will reach the stage where boys will serve as well. The narrator’s desire is to “enter” a young woman, which apparently would not be difficult to do because, as a Magistrate, he can have almost any woman he wants if his uncooperative libido will enable him to do so.

The main theme, as the narrator sees its, is the difference between Barbarism and Civilization.

The novel is an allegorical representations of imperialism. The focus is on the distinction between those who claim

to be ‘civilized’ and those who are held to be ‘barbarians’. The Empire, an unnamed kingdom, is highly influential

and authoritative government. Political power – European power

Here the Empire represents any and all empires and the barbarians are all cultures oppressed by colonization.

Imperialistic civilization at odds with the native. Colonel Joll and his followers in the Empire torture

the natives. This torture, an obvious violation of the humanity of the aboriginals, is a liberty taken by the Empire to impose the theory that its own will and intentions are more crucial than the rights of those that it is conquering.

The novel is a kind of debate that the natives are human or animal being.

The natives are labeled by most as "animals". And "human" qualities are the qualities possessed solely by Europeans.