Critical note on Waiting for the Barbarian by John Maxwell Coetzee

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.