Waiting for the Barbarians - Penguin Edition Early on in J. M. Coetzee’s novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee makes it known what his narrator’s “deal” is -- to thieve a term I first heard from novelist Ryan Boudinot.
This narrator’s “deal” serves to inform the reader and propel them forward, largely by establishing the narrator as a man wiling away his time in some forgotten corner of the world, content to leave a largely peaceful life.
This narrator’s “deal” serves to inform the reader and propel them forward, largely by establishing the narrator as a man wiling away his time in some forgotten corner of the world, content to leave a largely peaceful life.
I did not mean to get embroiled in this. I am a country magistrate, a responsible official in the service of the Empire, serving out my days on this lazy frontier, waiting to retire, I collect the tithes and taxes, administer the communal lands, see that the garrison is provided for, supervise the junior officers who are the only officers we have here, keep an eye on trade, preside over the law-court twice a week. For the rest I watch the sun rise and set, eat and sleep and am content. ... I have not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times. (9).
What unfolds, as expected, is anything but a quiet life in quiet times wherein the magistrate losses his position and becomes one with the “barbarians” whom he is overly (according to other officials) empathetic toward. This “deal” provides the narrative steam, carefully captured in a single paragraph, that condenses both the narrators motivation (to lead a “quiet life”) and history up until the action of the plot begins.
This is a story that, narratively fits with Afghanistan and Syria and hidden prisons and all the other conflicts in the world where man has been pitted against man and “empire” or “nation” is but forward as a reason for warring, violence and mayhem. As much as it is a testament to politically driven storytelling, but what is not lost on Coetzee is the language with which he spins his yarns. Words seem to come up and work on the reader like “Warm ochre mud squelches between my toes (115). Coetzee’s prose hovers between the simple “‘The night is still, the moon is dark” ( 101) to the occasionally poetic. “I gesture around at the dust that scuds before the hot late summer wind, bringer of blights and plagues.” ( 145))
Somewhere between the blights and scuds and dark moon we form an extremely empathetic relationship with this narrator (how can we not?) who is removed from his station and wrongfully imprisoned and tortured and forced to suffer humiliation at the hands of his captors, captors that refuse to believe that he is not acting with treason. Occasionally it breaks into the philosophical. “I lie on the bare mattress sand concentrate on bringing into life the image of myself as a swimmer swimming with even, untiring strokes through the medium of time, a medium more inert than water, without ripples, pervasive, colourless, odourless, dry as paper,” (165). But mostly, we, like the magistrate-narrator, feel shame — shame when confronted with beauty, war, crime, terror, imprisonment, and imposing ourselves on the, in Orientalist terms, “the other.”
This is a story that, narratively fits with Afghanistan and Syria and hidden prisons and all the other conflicts in the world where man has been pitted against man and “empire” or “nation” is but forward as a reason for warring, violence and mayhem. As much as it is a testament to politically driven storytelling, but what is not lost on Coetzee is the language with which he spins his yarns. Words seem to come up and work on the reader like “Warm ochre mud squelches between my toes (115). Coetzee’s prose hovers between the simple “‘The night is still, the moon is dark” ( 101) to the occasionally poetic. “I gesture around at the dust that scuds before the hot late summer wind, bringer of blights and plagues.” ( 145))
Somewhere between the blights and scuds and dark moon we form an extremely empathetic relationship with this narrator (how can we not?) who is removed from his station and wrongfully imprisoned and tortured and forced to suffer humiliation at the hands of his captors, captors that refuse to believe that he is not acting with treason. Occasionally it breaks into the philosophical. “I lie on the bare mattress sand concentrate on bringing into life the image of myself as a swimmer swimming with even, untiring strokes through the medium of time, a medium more inert than water, without ripples, pervasive, colourless, odourless, dry as paper,” (165). But mostly, we, like the magistrate-narrator, feel shame — shame when confronted with beauty, war, crime, terror, imprisonment, and imposing ourselves on the, in Orientalist terms, “the other.”
Her beauty awakes no desire in me: instead it seems more obscene than ever that this heavy slack foul-smelling old boy (how could they not have noticed the sell?) should ever have held her in its arms. What have I been doing all this time, pressing myself upon such flower-like soft-petalled children--not only on her, on the other one too? I should have stayed among the gross and decaying where I belong: fat women with acrid armpits and bad tempers, whores with big slack cunts. I tiptoe out, hobble down the stairs in the blinding glare of the sun (112).
When this novel is nearly finished, the terror seemingly passed with the “blinding glare of the sun,” a woman asks our empathetic narrator a simple question: “I can only think of the children. What is going to become of the children? She sits up in the bed. What is going to become of the children?” (176 - original emphasis).
And one can’t help but think of Kurtz somewhere whispering “The horror! The horror!”
And one can’t help but think of Kurtz somewhere whispering “The horror! The horror!”