Actions vs. Words

            As I read the novel I found myself asking if the Magistrate was any better than the others, such as the Colonel. In the beginning I found his idea of how he “barely scratched the surface” (17) in reference to the ruins, to be a perfect quote when transferred to his place in the situation between the soldiers and the barbarians. The question came up a lot after he took in the girl who had been blinded, for he had let her father and son be killed. While he may have talked about her and praised her in his mind the notion of actions speak louder than words works very well in his dealings with her. He is not trying to understand her or her people (the idea of learning her language is only brought up when they say goodbye) he used her when dealing with his old age, his lack of sexual virility

            I cannot deny that the Magistrate does change, yet it is only after he is locked away and tortured a shift occurs, after dealing with the “humiliations of imprisonment” (99) and being “terror stricken” (110). When he had to get clean to be presentable for the Colonel, I was brought back to when he ordered the prisoners to do so in the beginning. Yet after being freed he turns back to his old wishes, from being a martyr to wanting to be fat, “I want a life of simple satisfactions” (150). While it can be understood, one who has had his life turned upside down would want his old life back with; it seems like a cold wish.

            Altogether I find the characters development to be lacking, while he called the barbarians men when he was defending them from being beaten he continues to call them barbarians after the event, and imagines them raiding and slaughtering them. He thinks barbarians will be won over by “mulberry jam, bread and gooseberry jam” (179).

            The focus goes back on his sexual issues, and the woman he sleeps with tells him of the pain he caused the girl, to which he brushes aside claiming she didn’t tell his side of the story (176), but does his side matter? He considered the blind girl a mere surface, forgot about her, wanting her only when she was leaving. His conquest of her is a disgusting one, and I don’t think his side matters at all.

          

(Side Note: Later in the work when the Magistrate asks his torturer how he can eat with such dirty hands I was reminded of Shakespeare’s play Macbeth when Lady Macbeth cannot scrub off the blood that is staining her hands (146). The question of how one can go on to do regular activities after such horrific acts is a powerful one.)

Faceless Barbarians

            When I first began Waiting for the Barbarians, I was extremely perturbed with the lack of certainty about where, exactly, the settlement is. Going into the book I assumed, based on the origins of J.M. Coetzee, that this would be a novel about the colonization of Africa. However, the description of the girl’s eyes and hair and the constant references to “the frontier” recall allusions to Native Americans and the American Frontier; even the artwork on the cover of the book suggests that we are reading a story of the colonization of the Americas, or perhaps Asia. What also bothered me was the namelessness of “the girl”: the magistrate’s quasi-concubine.

            As I read on, however, the namelessness of the actual location of the settlement and the girl mattered less to me because there are countless victims of colonization, and that seems to be the point of the novel; perhaps it does not matter where this particular story takes place because there are so many stories similar to it. What matters are the true horrors of colonization: torture, murder, rape, displacement, genocide, etc. Even the magistrate does not receive a name; he is a, somewhat, complacent participant of imperialism—at least until things directly affect his own wellbeing. Like the “barbarians” there are nameless proponents of colonization who, while they may recognize the immorality of a nation’s subjugation of a native population, still continue to perpetuate the dominating force. Regardless of which specific settlement we happen to be looking at—whether it is in the Americas, Africa, or Asia—Coetzee is able to show the true face of colonization. 

Truth?

For me, Waiting for the Barbarians touched on a lot of the themes we have been discussing all semester. Like Nikki and Sarah have pointed out, some of the most obvious similarities are between this and 100 Years of Solitude. I definitely see these, too, and I like how we can see how these topics are important in many different contexts, as well as how they are important enough to merit Nobel attention.
The first thing that hit me in the novel was the Magistrate's belief in the truth. He talked to the first prisoners, advising them that if they just told the truth, they would be fine. Joll had no desire to hurt them if they were just traveling to the doctor. He keeps saying that while he may not know if what is the truth, he also does not have reason to disbelieve the prisoners. When Joll says that he has a process to get the truth, and that he can tell by the tone, the Magistrate really seems to believe him, and it isn't until the grandfather is killed that the Magistrate starts to question what Joll is doing.
This question of truth is strung throughout the novel and ties together themes of language and history. Like 100 Years of Solitude, Coetzee approaches the question of what history truly is. After torturing the Magistrate, he tells him that he needs to leave because they can't support him anymore. He is not a prisoner because "they do not have a record of him," so how could he have been their prisoner?. I think through this brief interaction, Coetzee is pointing to the flaws in history and our perception of the past. This made me think of how many undocumented, or just under-documented, atrocities and murders there have been, and how we can never really accurately gauge the influence of different groups in the past. Like in 100 Years where one Buendia stays alive just so he can preserve a memory of the massacre, Coetzee uses the Magistrate's life and imprisonment to point to how important and brutal details can be intentionally lost and concealed for posterity.
One of my favorite parts to look at in this novel, along with the others we have read, is the author's commentary on the power of language. In addition to exploring the concept of the truth, Coetzee directly looks at language, although more briefly. When the Magistrate has to explain his bag of the excavated letters to Mandel, he pretends that he knows the language to try and make a point. Coetzee closely ties this interaction to his questions of truth, beginning with Mandel saying, "A reasonable inference is that the wooden slips contain messages passed between yourself and other parties". This has been the government's approach to the truth throughout the novel: an "guilty until proven innocent" kind of approach. The Magistrate goes on to make up stories to go along with the language, using the power of lying to his advantage. The most interesting elaboration, I thought, is when the Magistrate says that one symbol could stand for "war," "vengeance," or "justice," depending on which way the character was turned. From this, I understood that Coetzee may be pointing to the power of language, but most importantly, how open language is to interpretation.
In the end, the themes of truth, history, and language became very intertwined for me, and I found myself questioning the subjectivity of all three of these things, and especially how they can shape one another, as well as the past, present, and future.

The Outsiders

The Outsiders

            Like Nikki, I also found myself drawing comparisons to Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude while reading Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.  In both novels, a fear of outsiders exists which ends up causing destruction.  Both towns get corrupted by outside influence and an otherwise peaceful town is thrown into shambles.  However, a key difference between the two novels is the reason that the corruption occurs.  In One Hundred Years of Solitude the outsiders are the ones who corrupt the town.  The townspeople live peacefully with no fights or death.  However, when outsiders appear (western influence) in the town and set up a factory, the town goes downhill.  The outsiders take what they want, and then when the endless rain begins, they leave the town to fend for themselves. 

The difference in Waiting for the Barbarians is that the reason for the corruption is fear of the natives (the barbarians), not an outsider.  Similar to One Hundred Years, the town is peaceful and the Magistrate enjoys, “serving out his days on this lazy frontier, waiting to retire” (9).  The town does not even have a proper prison because of their lack of crime.  However, the natives lived on the land first, and the Empire pushed them out.  For this reason, the Empire is convinced that the barbarians are forming an army and are going to attack.  The Empire imposes itself in the town, tears down homes to build barracks, imprisons innocent people, and even accuses the Magistrate of treason.  The town begins to live in fear, not only of the barbarians, but also of the soldiers who are supposed to be protecting them.

Nevertheless, even though the corruption of the town in Waiting for the Barbarians was caused by fear of the natives, I think it is important to note that the corruption was carried out by the Empire.  I believe that this novel, like One Hundred Years of Solitude, is trying to make a statement about government and imperialism causing destruction.  In Barbarians, not only does the town’s own government cause the corruption, but it is done in fear of people the government had conquered and mistreated in the first place.  These actions make the government to blame for the destruction of the town.  Even when the barbarians do attack and whitewash the town, they only do so because they are first provoked by the Empire.  While in Barbarians it is the town’s own government causing the corruption (unlike in One Hundred Years where it was an outside one), both towns lose their peace and innocence as a result of others’ influence.

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.

Narrative, History, Timelessness in Waiting for the Barbarians

J.M. Coetzee has created an Empire that is timeless and placeless, yet at the same time, can be traced and seen throughout history. Writing in a time and place, and in a culture founded by and rooted in oppression, we see an Empire that is all too realistic and reflective of the nature of Man, and political injustices. While there are many instances in history that can relate to the themes in Waiting For The Barbarians, I was reminded of a more recent example that demonstrated these ideas-that was ahead of Coetzee's time: The American War in Iraq and Afghanistan. It seemed all too coincidental, too, when you consider the dates in time of these invasions, and look at the year this book was awarded the Nobel Prize. 

In the first 50 pages of the novel there are explorations into humanity, civilization vs. savagery, racism, and imperialism that are similar to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Similar to the controversy surrounding torture that emanated out of the US in the early first decade of the 21st century, there are multiple torture scenes in this book that are described in agonizing detail. These moments, and others, as narrated by the magistrate, intend to investigate the moral-ness of human nature, but at the same time, expose the injustices of political institutions that have been aggressive in their histories. Further, the Colonel in charge of torturing the barbarians, is frequently alluded to and given special attention to for his glasses, which some confuse as a symbol of blindness. This, paired with his wrongful or misinformed pre-emptive imprisonment of the fishing people on the outskirts of the town, echo events similar to the US invasion of Iraq. This also correlates to a point the magistrate brings up on page 43, where he says that he does not want to create a dependent people (much like post-colonial Africa), through the corrupt virtues of an immoral "civilization"(his own scare quotes). 

Coetzee makes his ideal clear when he describes the torture of the Magistrate, who comes to the realization of the truth of the nature of man, and learns a major lesson. This particular passage also resinates a bit of a 1984 (George Orwell) vibe for me.

In the end, the Barbarians never strike. They vanish, seemingly, but their presence, or lack there of, is unknown. This is an interesting ending when compared to the initial consideration of the magistrate to get rid of the tortured tribe, to start clean. This, of course did not happen. And in a turn of fate, no one knows what to do once they're gone, they were seen as a problem as the center of the story, but were kind of a solution the whole time.

The Imprisonment of the Magistrate

The Magistrate as a Prisoner

            The narrator of Waiting for the Barbarians, the town magistrate, is a prisoner himself of several things. While he does not have physically have his hands bound as the older man and the boy in the first chapter, his hands are figuratively tied to listen to orders given by Colonel Joll because he is sent by the government of the Empire in the capital. The magistrate tells the reader multiple times that he does not agree with almost anything Colonel Joll does. He advises the Colonel against riding into the frontier looking for barbarians, and especially against taking the young, injured boy who has not had time to properly heal from his beatings and imprisonment by Colonel Joll himself. The magistrate, although the Colonel can tell that he does not agree, is forced to send most of the soldiers that are in the town with the Colonel, even remarking that their “first duty is to bring our visitor back safely” (43). When some soldiers come back with the fishermen, again the magistrate adamantly and vehemently disagrees with what the Colonel has just done, but is forced to keep them locked up until Colonel Joll comes back and is able to interrogate them.

            The magistrate is also a prisoner to the barbarian girl that is left behind, and even he himself cannot understand why he almost forces her to stay in his house, gives her a job, and food. After she tries and fails to seduce him, he sets up a cot in another room so they do not sleep together, but she remains in the bed in his room, even though she has a room off of the kitchen where she works with two other girls. His attraction to her is not sexual in any way, and it is not a question of whether he can physically perform or not since he is able to with the girl at the inn. They are not passionate together or have interesting, heated conversation, but for some reason he would rather have her in his room than on the street or in her own room. He hides behind legalities for originally keeping her in his room but he knows that he does not bring her home because vagrancy is illegal.