- Greylag Goose, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
- Greylag Goose, British Trust for Ornithology (with links to images, videos and sound)
- Greylag Goose, University of Tartu (with audio of the greylag's honk)
Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University
Waiting for the Barbarians
(1980)
J. M. Coetzee
(February 9, 1940 – )
Notes
dedication Nicolas and Gisela: Coetzee's children
4 barbarians:
6 magistrate:
65 greylag: a large water bird native to the UK and Europe
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65 beangoose: a highly migratory water bird
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65 pintail: or northern pintail, is a medium-sized migratory duck
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65 wigeon:
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65 mallard:
65 teal:
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65 smew:
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65 whooper
swan:
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92 the black flower of civilization: an allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850)
95 patrimony: heritage; inherited ancestral/paternal property, land
The Function of Literature
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.]
—Kafka's letter to Oskar Pollak (January 27, 1904)
Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews
(1992)
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.
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Comprehension Check Part 1
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Study Questions
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Review Sheet
Characters
the girl – has "straight black eyebrows...glossy black hair" (29); "walking slowly and awkwardly with two sticks, the sheepskin coat trailing behind her in the dust" (29); "a stocky girl with a broad mouth and hair cut in a fringe across her forehead" 83); "her black hair braided and hanging over her shoulder in barbarian fashion" (161)
Colonel Joll – from the Third Bureau ["'The Third Bureau is the most important division of the Civil Guard nowadays'" 2] (5)
Magistrate – the
narrator
(4); "a plump comfortable old man" (132)
Warrant Officer Mandel –
"Warrant Officer Mandel and his man first brought me back here and lit
the lamp and closed the door" (132); "'Run,' Mandel says. I run around
the yard under the blazing sun. When I slacken he slaps me on the
buttocks with his cane and I trot faster" (133); "'Here,' says Mandel,
and hands me a woman's calico smock" (134); "'The time has come,
Magistrate,' Mandel whispers in my ear. 'Do your best to behave like a
man.' I am sure I can smell liquor on his breath" (135); "clear blue
eyes, as clear as if there were crystal lenses slipped over his
eyeballs" (135); "rather rigid good looks, the teeth slightly too long
where the gums are receding" (135); "'When I was younger'—he flexes
the fingers—'I used to be able to poke this finger'—he holds up the
index finger—'through a pumpkin-shell.' He puts the tip of his finger
against my forehead and presses. I take a step backwards" (136)
Mai –
"Mai the cook greases the baking-pans: I watch her deft fingers dip
into the pot of lard and coat the pan in three swift circles" (147)
the
cook's grandson –
"My evening meal is brought by the cook's little grandson...He
enters very erect and proud, bearing the tray" (99);
"They call the cook's little grandson over and give him one end to
hold...The child grips his end of the rope with both hands, concentrating
on this important task" (134)
Places
the town – "what was once an outpost and then a fort on the frontier has grown into an agricultural settlement, a town of three thousand souls" (5); "From as far away as ten miles we can make out the jutting watchtowers against the sky; while we are still on the track south of the lake the ochre of the walls begins to separate out from the grey of the desert background" (86)
Magistrate's office – "A man sits at my desk in the office behind the courtroom" (89)
inn – (147)
north – "I have never before met northerners on their own ground on equal terms" (82)
mountains – "people being
pushed off the plains into the mountains by the spread of Empire" (82);
"On this bleak hillside" (83)
south – "the barbarians I am familiar with are those who visit the oasis to barter, and the few who make their camp along the river (82)
Time
summer – "on a warm summer evening" (5); "summer is wheeling slowly towards its end" (5); "'He says by mid-summer'" (82); "the approaching summer, the long dreamy siestas" (85)
winter – "the tail end of winter" (79); "'Bringing us out here in winter!'" (84); "approaching winter" (170); "premonitions of winter are everywhere" (175)
spring – "Spring is on its way" (78); "spring not yet here" (79); "As far as one can ever be sure, spring has come. The air is balmy, the green tips of new grass-shoots are beginning to push out here and there, flurries of desert-quail chase before us" (83); "In the fields the first spring shoots are beginning to show" (86); "'Spring snow'" (90); "'It is spring...the mating season: dogs go visiting" (99); "spring has come" (99); "In the fields the first spring shoots are beginning to show" (103); "these hot spring days already becoming summer" (108)
morning
–
"in mid-morning" (83)
dusk
–
"conversations with friends at dusk" (85)
evening – "At every moment that evening as I go about my business I am aware of what might be happening" (5); "on a warm summer evening" (5);
March
–
1 – "'On the first of
March, two weeks before the arrival of the expeditionary force, he [the
Magistrate] gave orders for myself and two other men (named) to prepare
at once for a long journey'" (96); "'We did not see why we could not
wait for the spring thaw" (96)
18 – "'We made
contact with the barbarians on approximately the eighteenth of March"
(96–97)
Sample Student Responses to J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians
Response 1:
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Reference
Links
- J. M. Coetzee, "Into the Dark Chamber: The Novelist and South Africa" (1986)
- Prior Texts
- C. P. Cavafy, "Waiting for the Barbarians," The Canon (1904)
- C. P. Cavafy, "Waiting for the Barbarians," trans. Richmond Lattimore (1955; includes analysis of the poem and discussion questions)
- Maria Boletsi, "The Travels of a Literary Topos: C. P. Cavafy's 'Waiting for the Barbarians' and its Visual Restagings"
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Crime and Punishment (1866)
- The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953)
- Brooks Atkinson, "Beckett's Waiting for Godot" (1956; review)
- David Smith, "In Godot We Trust" (2009; review)
- Franz Kafka
- "In the Penal Colony" (1914)
- Ivan Hewett, "Philip Glass: I'm drawn to Kafka's darkness" (2010)
- The Trial (1925)
- Zadie Smith, "F. Kafka, Everyman," The New York Review of Books (2008)
- Africa
- Productions
- Philip Glass, Waiting for the Barbarians (an opera in two acts)
- How to Pronounce Coetzee?
- How to Say: J M Coetzee and other Booker authors (2009)
- David Malouf with J.M. Coetzee, Adelaide Writers Week (video clip; 6:11 min.)
Empire, Africa
- Basil Davidson, Africa (1984 documentary series)
- Episode 1: "Different but Equal" (video clip, 51:45 min.)
- Episode 2: "Mastering a Continent" (video clip, 51:09 min.)
- Episode 3: "Caravans of Gold" (video clip, 51:36 min.)
- Episode 4: "The King and the City" (video clip, 15:19 min.)
Empire, Africa
- Episode 5: "The Bible and the Gun" (video clip, 51:36 min.)
- Episode 6: "The Magnificent African Cake" (video clips, part 1 20:54 min. and part 2 21:38 min.)
- Episode 7: "The Rise of Nationalism"
- Episode 8: "The Legacy"
South Africa, Apartheid
- Witness: "Apartheid, South Africa," BBC (1996, video clip, 58:46 min.; first person testimony and news reports to look at apartheid in South Africa from 1948 to 1994)
- Description and Related Links (links to individual clips)
South Africa, Apartheid
- "Whites," Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends, BBC (2000, video clip, 49:45 min.; in this documentary, writer and presenter Louis Theroux visits whites in South Africa who are refusing to accept Apartheid's end.)
Torture
- "We Have Ways of Making You Talk," dir. Kate Townsend, BBC (2005; video clip, 54:58 min.)
J. M. Coetzee
- J. M. Coetzee
- J. M. Coetzee
- Bibliography
- Dominic Head, "Coetzee's Life," The Cambridge Introduction to J. M. Coetzee (2009)
Reference
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.
Criticism
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February 24, 2014