Critical
note on Waiting for the Barbarian by John Maxwell Coetzee
Nikunj
Bhatti
Paper: 14 The African Literature
MA Sem: 4
Year:
- 2015-16
Email id: nikunjbhatti332@gmail.com
Submitted: Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Ø Introduction
John
Maxwell Coetzee is a novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of
the Nobel Prize in Literature. He writes many novels. It was chosen by
Penguin for its series Great Books of the 20th century and won both the James
Tait Black Memorial prize and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for fiction. It is
first published in 1960. His first work of fiction was Dusklands written in 1974.The second one is Waiting for Barbarian in 1980. "Waiting for the
Barbarians" is a novel published in 1980. “Waiting for the Barbarians” is
about morality and it deals with human cruelty. The title is from a tone from
the Greek post “Constantine P. Cavafy”.
The story was about imaginary Empire.
Ø Main characters:
·
The
Magistrate
The Magistrate is the story’s
first-person narrator. He is an administrator of a territory belonging to an
unnamed empire; he admits to his laziness, his fondness for young native girls,
and his satisfaction with the old ways of imperialism, he still emerges as an
admirable and sympathetic character. He searches for some significance in his
own wasted life. The Magistrate represents all men and women who face not only
their inherent weaknesses but the forces of totalitarianism.
·
Colonel Joll
Colonel Joll was an official in the
mysterious Third Bureau and an arm of the Civil Guard. He was created to
protect the empire, which is threatened by barbarians.
·
Unnamed girl
Barbarian girl blinded and crippled by
the Third Bureau, she is left behind by her people and taken in by the
Magistrate. 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.
Ø Themes
·
An exploration of an idea of barbarism:
Coetzee uses his great skill to
underline the irony in these final lines. The barbarians those menaces the
towns are never seen, the “absurd prisoners” brought back by the Third Bureau are
abject and ridiculous. We are never brought face to face with the enemy, who is
able to evade the Empire‛s reach. The people‛s need for the barbarian is
palpable.
When we see or read poem by Cavafy we
come to know about the poem that the poem is explores the necessity of the
“other” to the function and exercise of imperial power.
·
Theme of Violence
Coetzee represent both type of violence
physical as well as mental. Waiting for the Barbarians marks a discernable
change in Coetzee’s treatment of violence in the sense that unlike in Dusk
lands here Coetzee redirects his attention from the perpetrators to the victims
of tortures and to the witness of atrocities who don’t suffer themselves but who are demoralized by
the violence of others. the novel Coetzee shifts focus of his interest from the
tortures to the consequences of their aggressiveness the impact violence has on
the oppressed and on those who are not directly subjected to brutality but who
are aware of oppression of others. Coetzee intentionally used the word violence
because it has its own importance the crucial question is about the meaning of
violence for an individual, that is how an individual person come to understand
violence on one’s own terms.
·
Power
We can see the themes like Power in this
novel because when we read the novel we get sympathy with the people who were
barbarians according to other people who ruled over them the people were
tortured and killed by the empire‛s people the third bureau were wants to ruled
over the people and they wants to control The Magistrate has power over the
soldiers and civilians, and the Colonel has power over the Magistrate, as with
any hierarchy. In this story, power is authority.
·
Torture
Torture was used on the “barbarians and
also on the Magistrate. But the Empire did not even know who was who where the
frontier was concerned. Colonel Joll interrogated the old man and his grandson
in the beginning of the book using torture.
Ø Symbolism
This novel is rich in symbol and
meaning. Among them the movement of the seasons, the time of nature, set in
pointed opposition to the time of human history. The novel begins in late
summer, at a time of harvest and bounty and ends at the verge of winter, and
the end of civilization as known by the town‛s inhabitants. Even in the very
beginning the oblivion that threatens is introduced in a dream motif, which
anticipates the novels final pages as well as the barbarian girl.
§ The
empire: The empires
represent power that doesn't require that those who serve it love others but
merely perform duties.
§ Barbarians
Tribes: According to rumours
barbarian tribes have been arming and the empire would have to employ measures
to prevent war.
§ Square: the square can be seen from the
Magistrate‛s window. And he can see prisoners arriving from there.
§ Third
Bureau: The third Bureau
is described as an unsleeping guardian of the Empire being an investigative
agency.
Ø “Waiting for the Barbarians” as an allegorical
novel
It was intended as an allegorical attack
on apartheid South Africa. Magistrate (narrator) – a kind of all an bureaucrat
against and Colonel Joll, A young
barbarian woman. 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”. Protagonist
protest social unjust to Empire, but he still looks at the barbarians as a
dangerous tribe. The identity of barbarians were regarded as only “others”. Magistrate
relates that, There is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed
of a dark Barbarian hand. No man has not frightened himself with visions of the
barbarians carousing into his home breaking the plates, setting fire to the
curtains, raping his daughters.
It is against the image of the dark
barbarian that Eurocentric cultures have constructed their fragile sense of
civilization and identity. The proponents are deserted in the desert. Revisiting
of the novel today provides us an urgent need for political recovery of our
common humanity. The novel is a kind of debate that the natives are human or
animal being.
Ø Silence in “Waiting for the Barbarians”
This
novel mainly based on ‘silence’ or ‘colonialism’ or ‘Neocolonialism’.
This novel’s roots is in the poem of ‘C.
P. Cavafy’ wrote the same title with poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ In which
all people are ‘Waiting’ for the Barbarians’. But, after putting this kind of
word writer and poet both of plays chess with readers.
Edward
Said’s Concept of ‘Orientalism’ also helpful to understand the ‘Silence’ of
this novel, like
Orient ->Native
Occident ->Western
Ø Postcolonial
Analysis of J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians
Coetzee is sensitive and faithful to the
colonial history of his native country. This sensitivity has led Coetzee to
talk about the universal struggle between the oppressed and oppressor as a main
thematic perspective in his narratives. In postcolonial writing, he justifies
the position of the other by revealing the damaged and deformed South African
life under apartheid.
In order to prove its position as a
superior and civilized nation and culture, Empire attempts to validate the
existence of the native inhabitants of the area. In fact, since the barbarians
are being awaited any time and everywhere in the town, in each reported attack
or case of rape or plundering, they are immediately blamed for the illegal act-
guilt, crime or burglary without, any evidence. When the magistrate is sent to
prison, a soldier talks about them as: “Barbarians. They cut away part of the
embankment over there and flooded the fields. No one saw them” (Emir)
The Magistrate’s relationship with the
blind and lame barbarian girl can be understood and read as part of a colonial narrative
of which sexual fantasies towards the other and fear from the other are part.
The partly “filial” relationship between the Magistrate and the barbarian girl “becomes a metaphor for the relationship
between colonizers and colonized under the Empire, and sometimes sexual
connotations”
The Magistrate’s end, though ambiguous
and unpromising, seems to be ethical in the sense that he is now on the right
track of resistance and search for freedom. At the end of the novel and in its
last chapter, the whole place turns into a mess as the colonizer loses control
and the soldiers themselves turn into thieves. The Magistrate refuses to leave
the place and decides to tell the truth. (Al-Badarneh)
Ø
Conclusion
“Waiting for the
Barbarians” can also be criticized as violence on women. The women were
marginalised by tribe people and by power show the dark side of the time. So we
can say that this novel is about human violence and the waiting which never
ends.
v Works Cited
v
Al-Badarneh, A. F. Waiting for the Barbarians: The
Magistrate’s Identity in a Colonial Context. International Journal of
Humanities and Social Science , 5.
v
Emir, H. E. (n.d.). A Postcolonial
Analysis of J.M. Coetzee’s Two Novels: Waiting for the Barbarians and Life and
Times of Michael K. 2.
