Review Waiting for the Barbarians

    Review Waiting for the Barbarians

Janine Kieftenburg, 29 March 2015

Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel written by the South-African writer J.M. Coetzee and it is published in 1980. The novel presents an unnamed community. The protagonist is a somewhat older magistrate of a border outpost. He and the community where he lives in, live peacefully until Colonel Joll arrives, who is sent by the capital. Colonel Joll is sent to capture the Barbarians who are expected to revolt against the empire. The Barbarians are presented as a group of savages that want to harm the security of the community within the border.

The magistrate helps the colonel with his mission, as he is supposed to do in his role as magistrate. The magistrate starts to doubt about the guiltiness of the prisoners as the time flies by and more torture and death comes by. The colonel makes the prisoners tell the truth trough torturing the prisoners.  The magistrate asks the colonel how the colonel knows that the prisoners are telling the truth. The colonel answers “Pain is truth, all else is subject to doubt”(Coetzee).

A barbarian is killed and the magistrate notices his daughter who is left half blind. The magistrate takes her under his wing. She sleeps next to him and they live together as man and wife. The magistrate feels comfortable with her when he massages her. There is no real physical contact though. The feelings of the magistrate towards the girl remain unclear.

The magistrate enters a period in his life in which he is not certain anymore of the empire and he neglects his work as magistrate. He focuses more on sexual activity with other women than the woman he is living with. Eventually, he chooses to bring the barbarian girl back to her people. After a long and unauthorized expedition he says goodbye to the girl. The soldiers, who the magistrate took with him on the expedition, are angry with the magistrate for taking them on such a dangerous expedition for the magistrate his personal issues.

The magistrate is arrested for collaborating with the Barbarians when he comes back from his expedition. The magistrate is imprisoned and he loses the respect of the people for who he used to be and he is beaten and bullied by the soldiers. In the meantime, everybody waits for army to come back from their battle with the Barbarians.

The army comes back and the Barbarians have defeated them. The troops that were sent from the capital return to the capital and the civilians are left behind. The magistrate gets his old position back since there is nobody else left to do it. The community is in enormous panic because they suspect that the Barbarians will attack them.

The society keeps waiting for the Barbarians to attack and they feel threatened. A certain paranoia exists in the community. Everybody is obsessed with the Barbarians and everybody keeps condemning them. This unites the people in the community. Furthermore, the empire creates the ‘other’ in order to institutionalize disciplinary violence. The people are given a common enemy and in this way they do not revolt against the empire. Thus, the scapegoating of the Barbarians gives the empire the chance to maintain they power.

It can be argued that there is censorship in this novel because the characters in the novel, the magistrate and the barbarian girl, are difficult to interpret. The magistrate is unable to have a relationship with the girl. He can only imagine the girl as his made or his concubine. He was not able to see her as a real woman. So does this mean that he, also a man of the empire, actually thought that the Barbarians are not able to be more than savages? Now looking at the girl, it can be said that she was also difficult to understand. Sometimes she is resisting against the magistrate and sometimes she is succumbing him. It can be argued that she is not interpretable because the novel is written through the eyes of the magistrate and he does not know how the ‘other’ was feeling. The dominant class does not have the right to speak for the subaltern group.  So, by creating characters that are difficult to interpret, it is also more difficult for the censors to censor novel.

It is interesting to ask the question why this novel was never censored in South Africa. Because this particular story that J.M Coetzee describes does not present the empire in a good light. There are elements of avoiding censorship in this novel. Namely, the J.M. Coetzee does not once mention the name of the empire or the name of the tribe of the Barbarians or even city names. Additionally, there are no skin colors mentioned. Moreover, the unnamed empire is situated in the north. It has another climate than South Africa with snow and ice in the winter. So the censors did not have any proof that this story was about the South African regime. Furthermore, the censors in South Africa found this novel too literary to be banned. Additionally, the censors did not expect the average reader to read this novel. This thought actually portrays how low the South African regime was thinking of its society.

This example of avoiding of censorship through an imagined community in Waiting for the Barbarians is also present in the novel The Slynx, written by Tatyana Tolstaya. She presents a fictive community that lives in the future in Moscow. She does mention the city in her novel, but she presents a community that is not realistic, contrary to J.M. Coetzee. In Tolstaya’s story, we can also see how a community is oppressed and how censorship is apparent in a community. Just like J.M. Coetzee’s novel, the censors did not have enough proof to argue that Tatyana’s story is actually about Soviet Russia.

In conclusion, J.M. Coetzee successfully describes a story that actually tells the story of South Africa during the time of Apartheid. He uses different techniques in order to avoid censorship of the South African regime and he succeeds in this mission. The novel remained uncensored and he even earned a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003 with his novel Waiting for the Barbarians.

Bibliography:

Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1982. Print.