Themes in Literature/Belonging and Exile/The Barbarian in a Civilized Society

J.M Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians tells the story of a colonist Empire’s effort to maintain its grand narrative of the coming “barbarian” invasion and the man of conscience who questions the Empire he serves. To maintain the narrative, Empire or civilization labels the nomads as “barbarians,” torturing and neglecting them and spreading rumors or creating propaganda. Yet the man of conscience, the Magistrate or M - as I’d call him for short - sees the “barbarians” as the nomads, peaceful and “living in fear of everyone, skulking in the reeds, what can they possibly know of a great barbarian enterprise against the Empire?” How does the Empire determine the “barbarian” from the civilized? Through the lens of the Magistrate, we learn how the Empire uses the “barbarian” to keep control of its subjects.

At the start of the novel, Colonel Joll and the Magistrate, imperial officers of the Empire, begin questioning a boy and a man who are described as “prisoners.” But in M’s civilized society prisoners are rare because “there is not much crime here and the penalty is usually a fine,” so the only prisoners they are capable of having are the ones they call “barbarians,” the nomads who live in the Empire’s borderlands off the settlement in the story. In post-colonial theory, the two terms - “barbarian” and civilized - are a pair, a binary pair, a signified to a signifier, civilization to “barbarian.” To further understand the relationship between the terms, Maria Boletsi explains in her essay “Barbaric Encounters: Rethinking Barbarism in C.P. Cavefy’s and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians '' that “barbarian” and civilized form an interdependent relationship that “feeds the superiority of the civilized… Simultaneously, the definition suggests that the civilized has an unwillingness to understand the other’s language and thus to make the encounter with the other a communicative occasion.” Boletsi argues that in order for the civilized society to be recognized, they outcast the uncivilized, identify them, and are willfully ignorant of the other to not taint the civilized way of life. Within the context of the story, the relationship formed between the civilized and the “barbarian” comes from the Colonel’s search for truth about the barbarian uprising and M’s search for understanding the “barbarian” experience, with the communicative occasion being the torture of the “barbarians.”

While not actively participating in torture as the Colonel does, the Magistrate experiences it second-hand when he addresses the boy at the beginning of the novel and when he no longer hears the cries of the baby when the “barbarians” are imprisoned in the barracks, but he does experience a type of torture first-hand, as the interrogator, when he takes care of and examines the “barbarian” girl. When M addresses the boy after a session of interrogations, “have you had anything to eat?,” he does so with decency and sympathy, defining his position on the civilization - “barbarian” relationship. When he no longer hears the baby cry, a feeling of frustration comes to him that is a consequence of Colonel Joll’s presence and actions, “I curse Colonel Joll for all the trouble he has brought me, and for the shame too.” The Magistrate’s position is again defined. It is not until he houses the “barbarian” girl that he realizes he might as well have been as bad as the Colonel he curses so much, “I behave in some ways like a lover - I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her - but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.” Here is when his position becomes less defined and the definition of “barbarian” is slightly altered according to whoever behaves like one instead of the definitive distinction between the civilized and the “barbarian.”

To have more insight about M’s position in the civilization - “barbarian” relationship, author J.M. Coetzee shares knowledge on the torture chamber in his article “Into the Dark Chamber: The Novelist and South Africa.” Coetzee explains that the “torture room provide[s] a metaphor, bare and extreme, for relations between authoritarianism and its victims… with the purpose, if not of destroying him, then at least of destroying the kernel of resistance within him.” The resistance of the “barbarian” girl is present when he asks her about her torture and when she does not have sex with him. I argue that her resistance comes down when they finally have sex because she says to M, “yes, there were other men. I did not have a choice. That was how it had to be.” Her resistance was there even before him, as it was with the other men, but since her choice was never present, it is fair to assume that she suspected the same behavior of the other men in M, since he is an imperial officer. Even the civilized can act barbaric.

To maintain and preserve a civilized way of life, defensive strategies are to be put in place, and a threat has to be imminent. Because the Magistrate does not believe in the barbarian threat (Coetzee 9), the threat is believed - by him and us - to be conjured up, gossip that comes from a source of civilization, the capital. Rumors of danger are spread and framed in a way that brings urgency and whatever means are necessary to address the danger. In their article, “The Empire as the Embodiment of Modern Intellect: a Critical Reading of Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians through Levinas”, Mahdi Teimouri cites Judith Butler’s Frames of war, an exploration of modern war and portrayal of state violence, saying “any representation presupposes certain degree of framing which regulates one’s emotional and intellectual response to an event or situation.” Teimouri argues that framing the situation is equally important as the situation at hand in order to bring out the proper and desired reaction from the target audience. After Colonel Joll leaves the settlement, the Magistrate is confronted with and appalled by prisoners that have been detained “because they were hiding” (Coetzee 20). So they are deemed prisoners for hiding, and will be treated horribly because of the same reason, but the reason does not matter, for the only thing that matters is that they are “barbarians” and they are prisoners. It is because of this framing, and the knowledge from living on the settlement and encouraging commerce with the nomads, that M does not blindly believe the stories the Empire spreads about the “barbarians”.

The man of conscience, by the end of the novel, reaches an impasse. He cannot change the ways of the Empire alone and he cannot run the settlement as he genuinely wishes. The only thing he has power over are his actions to the treatment of the “barbarians”, while everyone else in civilization continues to believe the stories of the “barbarians”. The woman M sleeps with at the end of the novel says to him, “I am terrified to think what is going to become of us… I don’t know what to do any more. I can only think of the children” (176). He then reassures her that no harm will come to her.

Waiting for the Barbarians provides colonial context to the “civilization” - “barbarian” definitions and provides an understanding of how they are used in civilized society. By looking into the positions of the Magistrate and Colonel Joll, J.M. Coetzee shares how the Empire controls and maintains power over its subjects.

--Joel Pazmino