Read, Don't "Read Into"

            Bone-tired and quivering, the Magistrate’s rifle sight set on a ram, he has a semiotic crisis of existential proportions: 

“…there seems to be time for all things, time even to turn my gaze inward and see what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour: the sense that this has become no  longer a morning's hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds  to death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim; that for the duration of this frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things” (45).

            On a narrative level, his philosophizing is a rebellion against Coetzee’s authorial hand; his hopeless appeal to his barbarian lover to stay, and their pathetically inert goodbye tell us he knows he is an unwilling participant in a story, an actor with no agency, a marionette for Coetzee’s social comment. He confronts and accepts his place in Waiting for the Barbarians’s semiotic square where The Empire is “civilized,” the barbarian natives are “uncivilized,” the Third Bureau/Colonel Joll are not civilized, and the Magistrate himself is not uncivilized. The proverbial Empire is also the ancient “hunter” which, like a red giant star before it shrinks into a white dwarf, claws outside its borders before it resumes its fetal position. Imperialism is one of the death throes of any too-great society.

            The novel is conscious of itself as pure allegory, and our certainty that plot points and characters must “stand for other things” to accomplish its form's goals explains the actors’ thin life histories, the plot's stuttering development, and Coetzee's lush, haiku-like descriptive details (for this is where he has the most room for artistic invention; the symbolic construction is least contingent upon the vaguely Asian/African locale).

            But even more, the pride of this ram and its ignoble almost-death receive their adjectives only through human perception. Animalistic qualities are, much the like East-West Orientalist binary, the product of an alien culture defining another for purposes of subjugation. What is a “beast” to a buck but another buck? Examining the C.P. Cavafy poem whose title Coetzee borrows for the novel, which ends “And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians? / They were, those people, a kind of solution,” we conclude that human classification is a solution. To unpack the world around us instead of the one within us is to avoid tackling more unsettling, epistemological questions. The common means of literary criticism -- “interpreting” novels -- separates works into their component devices, unraveling a rainbow. But we need to do this to believe Waiting for the Barbarians.