Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee

Ich glaube, man sollte überhaupt nur solche Bücher lesen, die einen beißen und stechen. Wenn das Buch, das wir lesen, uns nicht mit einem Faustschlag auf den Schädel weckt, wozu lesen wir dann das Buch? Damit es uns glücklich macht, wie Du schreibst? Mein Gott, glücklich wären wir eben auch, wenn wir keine Bücher hätten, und solche Bücher, die uns glücklich machen, könnten wir zur Not selber schreiben. Wir brauchen aber die Bücher, die auf uns wirken wie ein Unglück, das uns sehr schmerzt, wie der Tod eines, den wir lieber hatten als uns, wie wenn wir in Wälder verstoßen würden, von allen Menschen weg, wie ein Selbstmord, ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. Das glaube ich.

[English translation 1: I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

English translation 2: If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? Good God, we also would be happy if we had no books and such books that make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. What we must have are those books that come on us like ill fortune, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.]

What engaged me then and engages me still in Kafka is an intensity, a pressure of writing that, as I have said, pushes at the limits of language, and specifically of German. No one who has really followed Kafka through his struggles with the time system of German can fail to be convinced that he had an intuition of an alternative time, a time cutting through the quotidian, on which it is as foolish to try to elaborate in English as in German. But Kafka at least hints that it is possible, for snatches, however brief, to think outside one's own language, perhaps to report back on what it is like to think outside language itself. Why should one want to think outside language? Would there be anything [end of page 198] worth thinking there? Ignore the question: what is interesting is the liberating possibility Kafka opens up.

In a more general sense, I work on a writer like Kafka because he opens for me, or opens me to, moments of analytic intensity. And such moments are, in their lesser way, also a matter of grace, inspiration. Is this a comment about reading, about the intensities of the reading process? Not really. Rather, it is a comment about writing, the kind of writing-in-the-tracks one does in criticism. For my experience is that it is not reading that takes me into the last twist of the burrow, but writing. No intensity of reading that I can imagine would succeed in guiding me through Kafka's verb-labyrinth: to do that I would once again have to take up the pen and, step by step, write my way after him. Which is to say that while, as I read it, I can understand what I wrote in the essay on Kafka ["Time, Tense, and Aspect in Kafka's 'The Burrow'" (1981)], I couldn't reproduce it today without rewriting it.

You ask about the impact of Kafka on my own fiction. I acknowledge it, and acknowledge it with what I hope is a proper humility. As a writer I am not worthy to loose the latchet of Kafka's shoe. But I have no regrets about the use of the letter K in Michael K, hubris though it may seem.

[page 202] I am not sure I would agree with the statement that Anglo-American or metropolitan forms of postmodernism are merely (that word again!) cultish, an accommodation to "late capitalism." Romanticism was cultish in its day, modernism was cultish: movements that capture the public imagination attract hangers-on, and hangers-on swell out the sideshows, the cults. It is true that a great deal of the energy of contemporary writing comes from the postcolonial peripheries of the Anglophone world. Yet I would be wary of setting up too clear an opposition between exhausted metropolis and vigorous periphery. To an extent the metropolitan center has run out of steam, to an extent the ex-colonial subjects are running the show. But to an extent also, with electronic communications, the old opposition metropolis-periphery has lost its meaning; and to an extent the success of "international" writers (a telling word!) [end of page 202] flows from a metropolitan taste for the exotic, provoked and catered to by the entertainment industry.

Returning to Kafka: I have no objection to thinking of alienation as not only a position but a practice as well. From that point of view, alienation is a strategy open to writers since the mid-eighteenth century, a strategy in the service of skepticism. What I balk at is the common understanding of alienation as a state, a state of being cut off not only from the body of socially dominant opinion but also from a meaningful everyday life (this is implicit in Marx's account of the worker who loses touch with what his hands are fabricating), and even (in the old-fashioned psychological sense of the term) from oneself: alienation equals madness or at least woundedness; art becomes the alienated artist's private means, his private vice even, for turning lack and woe into gain.

Leaving Kafka behind now, let me say two things. The first is that by its nature narrative must create an altered experience of time. That experience can be heady for both writer and reader. For the reader, the experience of time bunching and becoming dense at points of significant action in the story, or thinning out and skipping or glancing through nonsignificant periods of clock time or calendar time, can be exhilarat- [end of page 203] ing—in fact, it may be at the heart of narrative pleasure. As for writing and the experience of writing, there is a definite thrill of mastery—perhaps even omnipotence—that comes with making time bend and buckle, and generally with being present when signification, or the will to signification, takes control over time. You asked about claims for the capabilities of narrative, and this is one claim I make.

My other observation is about self-referentiality—the absorption, in radical metafiction, of reference into the act of writing, so that all one is left with on the page is a trace of the process of writing itself. This is obviously another capability of writing. But its attractions soon pall: if we are talking about narrative pleasure (and I'm not so ascetic as to wish to dismiss narrative pleasure), writing-about-writing hasn't much to offer.

[page 209] yes, time in South Africa has been extraordinarily static for most of my life. I think of a comment of Erich Auerbach's on the time-experience of Flaubert's generation, the generation that came to maturity around 1848, as an experience of a viscous, sluggish chronicity charged with eruptive potential. I was born in 1940; I was eight when the party of Afrikaner Christian nationalism came to power and set about stopping or even turning back the clock. Its programs involved a radically discontinuous intervention into time, in that it tried to stop dead or turn around a range of developments normal (in the sense of being the norm) in colonial societies. It also aimed at instituting a sluggish no-time in which an already anachronistic order of patriarchal clans and tribal despotisms would be frozen in place. This is the political order in which I grew up. And the culture in which I was educated—a culture looking, when it looked anywhere, nostalgically back to Little England—did nothing to quicken time. So I am not surprised that you detect in me a horror of chronicity South African style.

But that horror is also a horror of death—and here we come to the second part of your either/or. Historicizing oneself is an exercise in locating one's significance, but is also a lesson, at the most immediate level, in insignificance. It is not just time as history that threatens to engulf one: it is time itself, time as death.

The essay ["Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoyevsky" (1985)] came out of a rereading of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, two novelists for whom my admiration remains undimmed. I read them on what I take to be their own terms, that is, in terms of their power to tell the truth as well as to subvert secular skepticism about truth, getting behind skeptical ploys to get behind them ("What is truth?"). I accept Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, in their different ways, as writers of real philo- [end of page 243] sophical sophistication, or rather, since "sophistication" carries the wrong overtones, of real philosophical power. If there is a sense in which my reading of them "on their own terms" is not simply a repeat of the reading they were accorded in the West during their own day—as geniuses of rough realism from the Russian backwoods—it lies in treating them as men who not only lived through the philosophical debates of their day with the intensity characteristic of an intelligentsia held down under censorship, but also were the heirs of a Christian tradition more vital, in some respects, than Western Christianity.

[page 300] But writing under threat also has uglier, deforming side effects that it is hard to escape. The very fact that certain topics are forbidden creates an unnatural concentration upon them. To give one example: when it was forbidden to represent sex between blacks and whites, sex between blacks and whites was widely written into novels. Now that the ban has gone, the sex scenes are gone. I have no doubt that the concentration on imprisonment, on regimentation, on torture in books of my own like Waiting for the Barbarians and Life and Times of Michael K was a response—I emphasize, a pathological response—to the ban on representing what went on in police cells in this country.

Study Questions

In his essay, "Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State," Coetzee discusses the manipulation of sight. The prison in 1980s South Africa, for example, "may not be sketched or photographed" (Doubling the Point 361). Disturbing things or people are commonly ordered out of sight "so that no one has to hear or see them." Examine unsightliness in Waiting for the Barbarians and describe how it is made re-visible.
Notice the proliferation of terms that have to do with looking and seeing throughout the novel. Where does Coetzee direct our gaze? What does the Magistrate-narrator look at? How? What qualities of vision are offered? Where does vision improve or deteriorate? When does blurring occur? What is blindness?
In conjunction with seeing or unseeing eyes we see characters falling asleep and waking up. What meanings does sleep have in different passages of the novel? What about waking up?
Consider the paragraph which begins “Of the screaming which people afterwards claim to have heard from the granary” (9) and think about what it means to be a hearing witness. What connection, if any, does hearing have with seeing? How is each manifested? How does each relate to understanding? Remember that in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” the condemned man is allowed to see everything about the torture planned for him but does not hear the explanations given about it and therefore does not understand his fate. Also, what difference is there in a person’s ability to see or hear after torture?
What role does landscape have in the novel? How does nature figure in the story? How does Coetzee describe the natural environment such as the terrain, the sun, the weather, flora, or fauna? Notice Coetzee's attention to nature's dynamics ex. changes in landscape like the lake water getting saltier every year (81). How does the land's mutability affect the people living on it? How are seasons significant in the story? What is the point of bringing in nature as if to be a witness such as when the Magistrate describes how soldiers will "lock [him] up again out of the sight of the sky and of other human beings" (108)?
Consider as well human-induced changes to the landscape. Barbarians are blamed for altering the land: "The cut away part of the embankment over there and flooded the fields...The next morning it was like a second lake...They could flood these fields any time they chose to" (114). How does this power of choice, of agency and of control over the fate of other lives compare to that of the empire? How else do humans change land and to what effect?
What does the Magistrate do to express dissent with Colonel Joll's and, by extension, the central government's methods? The narrator mentions repairing damage and restoring goodwill after what the Third Bureau has wrought (78). Do you think what the Magistrate does is successful? Why or why not?
Look at a few scenes of waiting. Who is waiting? For what? Are there any parallels between scenes of waiting? If so, in what way? How is the waiting resolved? Are the waiters rewarded or disappointed?
Compare and contrast the portrayal of the Magistrate's and Colonel Joll's expeditions into barbarian territory. For example, how many people do they bring and who are they? What preparations do they make? How long are the trips? What purpose for traveling do they give? What is their experience of nature during the journey? What is their experience of the "barbarians"? What is the group's condition upon leaving v. returning? What is the result or consequence of the expeditions? How does the journey affect the two men?
Discuss Coetzee's use of prior texts such as the bible, Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" or The Trial, Cavafy's "Waiting for the Barbarians," and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. How does Coetzee's torture scenes compare to Gordimer's flogging scene in Burger's Daughter? What about to Kafka’s handling of torture in “In the Penal Colony”? What resonances does Coetzee create of other works and to what effect?
What makes someone a barbarian in this novel?
How are children used in the novel? How does Coetzee portray children in various parts and scenes ex. the dream sequences, the opening torture scenes, the public square torture scene, the fortifications against winter and barbarians toward the end?
Language
Truth
Genre
What is the purpose of animals in the novel? Consider the various animal similes and metaphors, many comparing the narrator to dogs, but also to monkeys (160), beasts (108), and bear (155). Which characters are compared to which animals? Why is there an especial concentration of animal imagery in the sections on pages 155–57?

the girl – "her black hair braided and hanging over her shoulder in barbarian fashion" (161)

winter – "the tail end of winter" (79); "approaching winter" (170); "premonitions of winter are everywhere" (175)

spring – "Spring is on its way" (78); "spring not yet here" (79); "'Spring snow'" (90); "spring has come" (99); "In the fields the first spring shoots are beginning to show" (103); "these hot spring days already becoming summer" (108)

Coetzee, J. M. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Print.

Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. 1980. New York: Penguin, 2010. Print.